POEM
The Last Movie
Rachel HadasSaturday, April 5. Welles’s Othello:
black and white grid of rage,
steam of sheer fury spewing from the vent
of violence that followed where they went.
Wind howled on the battlements, but sun
gilded glum canals. The lovers floated
beneath black bridges, coupled in stone rooms.
The unrepentant villain (at the start
so all the rest was flashback)
dangled from a cage
squinting inscrutably at the funeral
procession winding through the town below.
The air was full of wailing.
Knives of sunlight glittered on the sea.
We lurched out onto Fifty-Seventh Street.
You said “I think I’m dying.”
Next week your eyes went out.
Shining under the lamp,
your blue gaze, now opaque,
your face drawn sharper but still beautiful:
from this extremity you can attempt
to rise to rage and grief. Or you can yield
to the cozy quicksand of the bed.
You wave your hand at walls of books:
“What do I do? Do I throw all these away?”
Their anecdotes, their comforts—now black glass.
Rachel Hadas, “The Last Movie” from Halfway Down the Hall: New and Selected Poems. Copyright ? 1998 by Rachel Hadas. Reprinted with the permission of Wesleyan University Press.
Source: Halfway Down the Hall: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 1998)
