Rachel Hadas is the Board of Governors professor of English at the Newark campus of Rutgers University, where she teaches poetry in the new MFA program. She is also the author of more than a dozen books, most recently The River of Forgetfulness (2006), a collection of poems, and Classics (2007) a selection of prose.

Bath

Bath as in water. Here a bath of light,

daylong immersion, glare

shimmering and lapping

through the shutters.

Memory of bath and bath of memory:

I dip in, get out, dry off, resubmerge.

Now that I am far away I see

clearly that your illness is a bath

in which you soak, then presently climb out.

In vain: this bath goes everywhere with you,

portable, inconspicuous,

the inner bath your brain is stewing in,

the bath they tested with the spinal tap.

You do not recognize that you are soaking.

Comfortably you lie back.