New Yorker Poetry Rachel Hadas "A Poultice" and Ira Sadoff "I never needed things"

I have been thinking of Rachel Hadas and was so grateful to find a new poem from her in the New Yorker, today...it was like visiting an old friend. Rachel and I knew each other in Princeton; she used to return to visit her advisor, Edmund Keeley, for her dissertation on Robert Frost and the Greek Poets.  She is a great admirer of James Merrill's work, and counted him as a friend and mentor.   Rachel lived in Greece for a period of her life.  The space sounds like Vermont in this poem. The poem is so lyrical and perfect in its couplets. I love her poem.  It makes me want to write, again, to find a poetic voice, a poet's words.

A Poultice

Tumeric, rosemary: blend with run.
Winter is fading, spring will come,

snow will melt, and leaves set in.
Rosemary, turmeric: shake in gin.

Tumeric, bourbon, rosemary:
a blue-green bruise leaks toward my eye

(a week ago I bumped my head).
I swab and bathe it.  The bruise will fade

faster with this concoction
recommended by my son.

Soak a cloth and wipe the place.
Weapons are poised to fight in space.

Refugees packed in lifeboats drown.
Cyber attacks: the system's down,

an outage no one can repair.
The turmeric has stained my hair.

The pillow smells of alcohol.
Wind and rain and petals fall.

Sunday excursions: Hamilton Grange,
the empty streets subdued and strange,

the widowed house perched in its park.
White petals gleam in the gathering dark.

April this year is cool and slow.
The stain seeps toward my left eyebrow.

Care for the hurt place: soak, swab, wrap.
And then, before I take a nap,

dab the spot with oil of myrrh.
The poultice: patience and desire.

Turmeric, rosemary, and rum:
my love and I are rocked in time.

The motion lulls us, we forget
the bruise, the wound, the doom, the threat.
--Rachel Hadas

Oh, thank you, Rachel.   .
.
In the same issue, there is a poem by Ira Sadoff, a poet known from my residencies at The Breadloaf Writers Conference in Middlebury, Vermont.   The poem is: "I Never Needed Things". I will just quote the first couple of stanzas as my husband sailed to the Azores, I adore cashmere sweaters, but not cabernet, only merlot and pinot noir...a poem 'grabs us' with its evocation of images in our own minds as we read it...

I never loved a shiny car, longed for 
holidays in the Azores, cashmere sweaters
to make life matter more.  I don't need

that great Cabernet, though Chateau Montelana 
sends me back to a pond, a vineyard picnic --
the woman I'm with -- she's a different story....