Two Poems

by Rachel Hadas


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​Bristle

Henry James uses the verb “bristle”
less of an animal’s fur
than of the rebarbative atmosphere,
alert to threats, disruptions, quivering
with challenge from all sides,
that attends any effort to depict
the multifarious facets of experience
(he wrote) in fiction. And not only fiction,
but how we live our lives beyond the book.
Any day may be as rich in challenges
as a struck target bristling with darts.
Porcupine quills, a dog’s hackles, a cat’s tail
bottle-brushed with adrenaline and danger:
every morning we confront the news.
The headlines bristle. It seems almost soothing
to keep on moving down, down, down the screen,
away from the flicker and throb of conflagration,
although that very process, doomscrolling,
bristles with the terror in its name.

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Balconies

Balcony in Ilissia.
Sleepy sparkle: morning sun,
then in the late afternoon
barely brushing the mountaintop
a rainbow fingers reaches down.
Balcony on Aigina.
Slinking, strolling through the streets
inches from the pale green sea,
a tribe of silent orange cats.
Lavender table, turquoise chairs
set out on the pebbly beach.
Octopus hanging on a line.
Is that a gypsy caravan?
Lights reflecting on black water.
Unexpected orange moon.
Balcony in Jerusalem.
​Shopping before Shevuot
in the German Colony.
Balcony in Ilissia.
In our hosts’ grown daughter’s room,
French, German, English, Greek
tomes about Neolithic art.
Limestone caves and tallow lamp.
History of the human hand
paging the album of the past.
Languages and dialects,
voices merging into sleep.
Thunder over Aigina.
Swallows diving from the roof
of the Hotel Liberty,
blue and white awning pocked with rain.
What is lost and what remains.
Balcony in Ilissia.

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Rachel Hadas is the author of more than twenty books of poetry, essays, and translations.