{An Umbrella Special Feature}


Rachel Hadas

is Board of Governors professor of English at the Newark campus of Rutgers University.

The most recent of her many books is Strange Relation: A Memoir of Marriage, Dementia, and Poetry (Paul Dry Books 2011).

A new volume of poems, The Golden Road, is forthcoming in 2012 from Northwestern University Press.


—Back to CSM Contents/Issue Links—

The Kaleidoscope

The slow kaleidoscope of every night
turns and keeps turning, and the world breaks open.
Palimpsests suddenly exposed to air
let us read a few hermetic marks
before they shiver and collapse to dust.

Among our morning errands, fragments surface—
flights, a partition, a wet paper napkin.
Made of some substance malleable and sly,
they swiftly sink from sight, but underlie
the slow kaleidoscope of every day.