The New Yorker

 

Poems APRIL 9, 2012 ISSUE

The Yawn

BY RACHEL HADAS

 

My visiting tall son
is sleepy. His sweet gape
brings back his father’s yawn.
Seeing our lost husband and lost father
suddenly conjured up, I laugh. My son
frowns. Does he think
it’s at him I’m laughing?
The cat opens her mouth to mew.
The orphaned piano: it yawns, too.

 

 

Poems JANUARY 4, 2010 ISSUE

Only So Much

BY RACHEL HADAS

 

I bend to the open notebook; distracted, turn my head.
Tiny brown ants are climbing up a stalk of goldenrod.

It isn’t clear what goal they hope to reach.
I pick up a sharpened pencil, start to sketch.

 

A passing cloud; the sky goes dull. I shut
the notebook and open it from the back, to write.

 

There is only so much we can notice all at once.
Now this morning’s dream makes an appearance:

 

packed lecture hall where students overflow
to aisles and floor. What do they want to know?

 

I have the sense they’re gathered here to learn
some kind of surgery. The brain donation

 

card, wallet-size, arrived in this morning’s mail.
I close the notebook. The patient ants still crawl.

 

A sudden breeze: the grasses toss their tops.
Wild strawberry runners are clambering over this rock,

 

where, if I sat here long enough, eventually
the tough, lithe tendrils would also crisscross me.

 

I could climb down from my temporary tower,
go to the house and fill a glass with water,

 

get out my watercolors, dip my brush,
memorialize this moment with a wash

 

of color; sketch the runners, trace a border,
as if imitation equalled order.

 

Or I could take a walk down to the brook
or stretch out in the hammock with a book

 

or let my thoughts’ red runners trace a line
to the null magnet of my husband’s brain,

 

the hospital where he’s “undergoing observation,”
the arid wide plateau of the condition—

 

a battleground to which I will return.
But there is room for only so much attention.