Rachel Hadas: Pastorals

             The Old House

The old house a Pandora’s box of needs.

She glanced up from her book and met my eyes.  We smiled and shook our heads.

“I come to life,” she says, “when you are here.  Year after year, a lingering last look and a promise.  Live in me, animate me, keep me warm.  Who but you can fill my empty spaces?”

Starting slowly, speeding up, days cluster and accumulate.  The house: is it a big kaleidoscope?  An anchor?  Or a threadbare procession of passing pilgrims whose hope of a mild interlude in a green zone yields to the need to wake and dress and leave, once they have put their city faces on?

In Secondhand Prose, St. Johnsbury’s secondhand bookstore, where I buy too many poetry anthologies year after year, I found and have since lost a poem by John Ashbery that contains the line “silence already filled with noise.”  I can’t think of a better description of these summers – or wait, “noise already filled with silence” works just as well. Benign silences of people’s individual lives, the rhythms of different days, the interlude here.  No master list exists of all the guests who’ve come over the years, but their friendly phantoms hang around.  When Alicia Stallings, exhausted between the end of one writers’ conference and the beginning of another, visited in 2019, the whooshing of the dryer in the room behind the bedroom where she was resting and the buzzing of bees audible on the porch outside combined to lull her into the first nap she’d taken in years. 

Outside the room, life went on.  None of the doors in the house shuts tight, a feature it shares with our (also old) New York apartment.  Life as background noise?  Dreams the foreground?

~~

                 Red Book

The red book is a stout biography, the kind that used to be called a doorstopper.  Its title is Red Comet, but the book itself is more like a long freight train, a slow train,  a train crammed with information, a train that stops at every station, not to let anyone out but to take more in.  Not more passengers, but more records of three decades’ worth of acts and facts: the precocious child, the college student, the dorm room with its yellow walls and dark green bedspread, courses taken, books read, notebooks filled, scrapbooks, drafts, papers, letters, dates.  Days snatched in fragments and trapped on the page; aspiration; rage.

Or say it is a comet, not a train.  The trail this comet made was, as is the nature of comets, bright and brief: an ardent arc of thirty years of a life, emblazoned across the middle of the twentieth century.

She lived, she wrote, she married, she had two children, she struggled and strained against the cage of what Red Comet keeps reminding me was more than just a tightly girdled, was for a woman a suffocating age.  She died at thirty.  She left a trail of poems.

Doomed?  Not necessarily.  Beginning, middle, end: a comet in its flight.  And the biographer, after arduous research, sits down to write, to trace the arc and shape a narrative young woman poets read and recognize some parts of and wonder how to live.

~~

                Walk with Elephants

Late summer morning, mist not yet burned off.  I and my neighbors on either side, Janet and Sharon, climb the hill on our weekly walk.  Each of us carries her own silent elephant.

If my elephant, say, were somehow to drop from my back and plod and sway majestically away, knee-deep through the meadow frothy with Queen Anne’s Lace and on toward that somber stand of maples, what would I say?  What, straightening our backs, would any of us, relieved of our burden, say?

That still unfinished cabin, that chained hound daily baying – these are not merely scenery we pass.

They’re also where we live. Take my house: it has a new red roof, but inside something’s missing.

Something is always missing. And something else is present and abundant.

Autumn is just around the corner. Dew-spangled cobwebs catch the morning light.  Never free of elephants, one incomplete world blends into the next, glistening like this morning once the mist has burned off.

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Copyright 2025 Rachel Hadas. From Pastorals by Rachel Hadas (Measure Press, 2025).

Rachel Hadas’s recent books include Love and Dread, Pandemic Almanac, and Ghost Guest.  Her translations include Euripides’s Iphigenia plays and a portion of Nonnus’s Tales of Dionysus. Her honors include a Guggenheim fellowship and an award from the American Academy-Institute of Arts and Letters.