Rachel Hadas: 460 Riverside Drive

We lived on the ground floor. The doorman Earl

sat in the lobby. From our living room

through the wall we could hear

Earl’s explosive sneezes loud and clear.

The knob of our apartment’s front door

was big and brass, and Earl would vigorously

grasp and twist it, and with rag and smelly polish

noisily buff that knob until it gleamed.

It always gleamed. I knew

that brass polish was poison.

From our side of the door

the knob would visibly

turn as Earl twisted it, apparently

of its own accord,

untouched by human hand.

Visitors didn’t understand.

Who was out there?

What ghostly messenger

was rattling away unseen

on the other side of the door?

Who, sent from where, was trying to get in?

The only polite thing was to ignore

the uncanny energy.

A lifetime later, it is clear to me,

or at least less murky:

I understand

Earl as a harbinger

from an undiscovered land.

White gloves and can of polish; courtesy.

“Don’t fall down, now!” he’d admonish me.

Why should I fall? I wondered. I was five,

six, seven. I was agile and alive.

I roller-skated up and down

outside Grant’s Tomb or on Riverside Drive.

It was the old ladies (these were the Fifties)

teetering along on their high heels,

hatted and gloved, with seams

in their stockings, and with glassy-eyed

fox furs draped over their massive chests,

who might fall down, not me.

Was it because it would have been

rude to warn them

that Earl kept warning me?

Mortality

has caught up with those ladies and with him,

rattled their doorknobs (it was time); gone in.

That lobby was so cold in wintertime,

I still remember:

the stiff wind off the river

so strong that neither Earl nor any tenant

could shut the outer door at all.

Eventually, Earl, everyone will fall.

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Copyright 2023 Rachel Hadas. From Ghost Guest (Ragged Sky Press, 2023)

Rachel Hadas is the Board of Governors Professor of English at Rutgers University—Newark and the author of more than 20 books of poetry, essays, and translations.