New York, March 2020
Nothing new,
but it feels like an end.
An end that’s new.
This end is now?
No, I said new.
But who
could hear me through my mask?
Don’t ask.
Love
wears a glove.
I want to touch my friend.
.
This fear feels new.
We’ve all forgotten how
to live with it, to live it
day by day. And each
day begins anew,
begins a new
now we do not know,
oh no,
do not yet know.
*****
Rachel Hadas writes: Mid-March 2020, as I look back, did feel like both an end and a beginning. Any moment in time is that, of course, but one’s sense of discontinuity was certainly heightened then. A lot of familiar features of life just stopped, and an uncharted period began. The confusion of trying to wrap one’s mind around all this at once is echoed in the overlapping and echoing words “no, new, knew, know…”
“Ides of March MMXX” is collected in my 2022 volume “Pandemic Almanac,” a book in which, contrary to my usual practice, I append date and place of composition to each poem. In 2020 we were in Vermont from early April until late November; “Ides” was written before people who could began to leave New York City in large numbers.
My 2025 collection “Pastorals” groups together texts written in and about Vermont over a period of years, certainly including the years of Covid but also extending both before and after the pandemic (if indeed there is an after). I mention “Pastorals” because in one of its pieces (they’re all prose poems), “Blue Book,” which was written sometime later during the pandemic, I do something similar to the play in “Ides” on “no, know,” etc: “We were elsewhere; we travelled back and forth, here and there. Now mostly here. Now only here. Now here: nowhere.”
Rachel Hadas (born November 8, 1948) is an American poet, teacher, essayist, and translator. Her most recent essay collection is Piece by Piece: Selected Prose (Paul Dry Books, 2021), and her most recent poetry collection is Ghost Guest (Ragged Sky Press, 2023). Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Ingram Merrill Foundation Grants, the O.B. Hardison Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
Photo: “Not Available Hand Sanitizer Gloves Rubbing Alcohol Face Masks” by Duncan Rawlinson – Duncan.co is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.
Form in Formless Times 