Description: By noon, now in mid-September, tall shadows are already looming, dark and melodramatic, striping the lawn and garden. Friendly ghosts remain, but most of the guests have receded, each taking with them a jar of applesauce to taste or inhale and remember. Or to give away. Emptier, the house seems both bigger and smaller. A cycle fills with stillness. Silence grows on the trees. These last mornings I put on the rubber boots I bought at Morrison's Feed Bag, the crimson boots imprinted with yellow chickens, and head out across the cold wet spiderweb-spangled grass toward the Duchess tree. "May something always go unharvested," wrote Robert Frost. Almost everything goes unharvested. I pick an apple up and take a bite.
Brief description: 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. Professor Emerita at Rutgers-Newark, where she taught for many years, she now teaches at 92Y in New York City and serves as poetry editor of Classical Outlook. Her honors include a Guggenheim fellowship and an award from the American Academy-Institute of Arts and Letters.