by Robert Hass
not far from the marker commemorating the founding
of this city of Baptists by a Caribbean Jew who arrived
from Jamaica on a riverboat, or from the Browning Chapel
at Baylor where the words of two English poets
are lit by the heat of the spring sun and the reds and blues
of Arts & Crafts glass, what is that racket in the trees?
Boat-tailed grackles and white-winged doves.
And in San Antonio where Louisiana live oaks on the campus
of the university are married to red brick in paradise
and along the river that the Cozhuitlan people called Yanaguana
where the Canary Island families settled with inducements
by the Spanish crown, so that two hundred years later
General Antonio López de Santa Anna crushed those Yankee insurgents
and tax resisters at the old Pueblo of the Alamo
or where, in the other telling, Travis and Bowie and Crockett,
under the spindly cottonwoods, would not be brought to their knees.
Cottonwood by the river, live oaks in the park and what is that racket?
Boat-tailed grackles and white-winged doves.
North of there the air changes a little and imperceptibly,
in this valley or that, so the species of willow along the river
change and the insects in the leaves and the size of fruit
and the seeds scattered on the lawns of small towns
with their statues of soldiers from the various wars
are not so large and require different claws or beaks
and you come to a place of mourning doves and Inca doves
with their fluting coos and mute blackbirds with yellow eyes.
So what is this business of walls and border guards?
Who owns that country anyway? What was that racket in the trees?
Ay-yi-yi-yi. Boat-tailed grackles and white-winged doves.
SEPTEMBER NOTEBOOK: STORIES
Everyone comes here from a long way off
(is a line from a poem I read last night).
Driving up 80 in the haze, they talked and talked.
(Smoke in the air simmering from wildfires.)
His story was sad and hers was roiled, troubled.
Alternatively:
A man and a woman, old friends, are in a theater
watching a movie in which a man and a woman,
old friends, are driving through summer on a mountain road.
The woman is describing the end of her marriage
and sobbing, shaking her head and laughing
and sobbing. The man is watching the road, listening,
his own more diffuse unhappiness in abeyance,
and because, in the restaurant before the film
the woman had been describing the end of her marriage
and cried, they are not sure whether they are in the theater
or on the mountain road, and when the timber truck
comes suddenly around the bend, they both flinch.
He found that it was no good trying to tell
what happened that day. Everything he said
seemed fictional the moment that he said it,
the rain, the scent of her hair, what she said
as she was leaving, and why it was important
for him to explain that the car had been parked
under eucalyptus on a hillside, and how velvety
and blurred the trees looked through the windshield;
not, he said, that making fictions might not be
the best way of getting at it, but that nothing he said
had the brute, abject, unassimilated quality
of a wounding experience: the ego in any telling
was already seeing itself as a character, and a character,
he said, was exactly what he was not at that moment,
even as he kept wanting to explain to someone,
to whomever would listen, that she had closed the door
so quietly and so firmly that the beads of rain
on the side window didn’t even quiver.
Names for involuntary movements of the body—
squirm, wince, flinch, and shudder—
sound like a law firm in Dickens:
“Mr. Flinch took off his black gloves
as if he were skinning his hands.”
“Quiver dipped the nib of his pen
into the throat of the inkwell.”
The receptionist at the hospital morgue told him
to call the city medical examiner’s office,
but you only got a recorded voice on weekends.
Setup without the punchline:
three greenhorns are being measured for suits
by a very large tailor in a very small room on Hester Street.
Once there were two sisters called Knock Me and Sock Me;
their best friend was a bear named Always Arguing.
What kind of animals were the sisters? one child asked.
Maybe they could be raccoons, said the other.
or pandas, said the first. They could be pandas.
“Why?” he asked. “Because she was lonely,
and angry,” said the friend
who knew her better,
“and she ’d run out of stories.
or come to the one story.”
It is good to sit down to birthday cake
with children, who think it is the entire point
of life and who, therefore, respect each detail
of the ceremony. There ought to be a rule,
he thought, for who gets to lick the knife
that cuts the cake and the rule should have
its pattern somewhere in the winter stars.
Which do you add to the tea first, he ’d asked,
the sugar or the milk? And the child had said,
instantly: “The milk.” (Laws as cool
and angular as words: angular, sidereal.)
Stories about the distribution of wealth:
once upon a time there was an old man
and an old woman who were very, very poor.
How Eldie Got Her Name
The neighborhood had been so dangerous,
she said, there was one summer when the mailmen
refused to deliver the mail. Her mother
never appeared and her grandmother,
who had bought a handgun for protection
and had also taught her how to use it,
would walk her to the post office for the sweet,
singsong, half-rhymed letters that smelled,
or that she imagined smelled, of Florida.
She had, when she was ten, shot at an intruder
climbing in the window. The roar,
she said, was tremendous and she doesn’t know
to this day whether she hit the man or not.
(A big-boned young woman, skin the color
of the inside of some light-colored hazelnut
confection, auburn eyes, some plucked string
of melancholy radiating from her whole body
when she spoke.) Did her mama come back?
They had asked. She never came back.
The mail started up again but the letters stopped.
Turned out she was good in school, and that
was what saved her. She loved the labor
of schoolwork. Loved finishing a project
and contemplating the neatness of her script.
Her grandmother shook her head, sometimes,
amused and proud, and called her “Little Diligence.”
Punchline without the setup:
and the three nuns from Immaculate Conception
nodded and smiled as they passed,
because they thought he was addressing them in Latin.
He had known, as long as he ’d known anything,
that he had a father somewhere. When he was twelve,<
br />
his mother told him why he had no shadow.
Because she, not her sister, answered the door,
she was the first to hear the news.
A Ballad:
He loved to watch that woman sew.
She let her hair grow long for show.
Riddle’s a needle (a refrain might go)
and plainly said is thread.
She looked beautiful, and looked her age, too.
She’d had a go at putting herself together;
she had always had the confidence that,
with a face like hers, a few touches
to represent the idea of a put-together look
would do, like some set designer’s genius
minimalism. It had a slightly harridan effect
and he remembered that it wasn’t what was
headlong or slapdash about her, but the way
they gestured, like a quotation, at an understanding
of elegance it would have been boring to spell out,
that had at first dazzled him about her.
He felt himself stirring at this recognition,
and at a certain memory that attended it,
and then laughed at the thought that he had
actually stimulated himself with an analysis
of her style, and she said, as if she were remembering
the way he could make her insecure, “What?
What are you smiling about?” and he said, “Nothing.”
And she said, “oh, yes. Right. I remember nothing.”
Two jokes walk into a bar.
A cage went in search of a bird.
Three rabbis walk into a penguin.
A boy walks out in the morning with a gun.
In the other world the girls were named Eleanor and Filina,
and one night it was very warm and they could not sleep
for the heat and the stillness, and they went outside,
beyond the wall of their parents’ garden and into a meadow.
It was dark, moonless, and the stars were so thick
they seemed to shudder, and the sisters stood a long time
in the sweet smell of the cooling grasses, looking at the sky
and listening in the silence. After a while they heard a stirring
and saw that a pair of bright eyes was watching them
from the woods’ edge. “Maybe it’s their friend, the bear,”
one of the children said. “I don’t like this story,” said the other.
SOME OF DAVID’S STORY
“That first time I met her, at the party, she said,
‘I have an English father and an American mother
and I went to school in London and Providence, Rhode Island,
and at some point I had to choose,
so I moved back to London and became the sort of person
who says puh-son instead of purr-son.’
For the first person she had chosen an accent
halfway between the other two.
It was so elegant I fell in love on the spot. Later,
I understood that it was because I thought
that little verbal finesse meant
she had made herself up entirely.
I felt so much what I was and, you know,
that what I was was not that much,
so she just seemed breathtaking.”
“Her neck was the thing, and that tangle of copper hair.
And, in those days, her laugh, the way
she moved through a room. Like Landor’s line—
she was meandering gold, pellucid gold.”
“Her father was a philosopher,
fairly eminent in that world, and the first time
I was there to dinner, they talked about California wines
in deference to me, I think, though it was a subject
about which I was still too broke to have a thing to say,
so I changed the subject and asked him
what kind of music he liked. He said, ‘I loathe music.’
And I said, ‘All music?’ And he said—
he seemed very amused by himself but also
quite serious, ‘Almost all music, almost all the time.’
and I said ‘Beethoven?’ And he said
‘I loathe Beethoven, and I loathe Stravinsky,
who loathed Beethoven.’”
“Later, in the night, we talked about it.
‘It’s feelings,’ she said, laughing. ‘He says
he doesn’t want other people putting their feelings into him
any more than he wants,’ and then she imitated
his silvery rich voice, ‘them putting their organs
into me at great length and without my consent.’
And she rolled onto my chest and wiggled herself
into position and whispered in my ear,
‘So I’ll put my feelings in you, okay?’
humming it as if it were a little tune.”
“Anyway, I was besotted. In that stage, you know,
when everything about her amazed me.
one time I looked in her underwear drawer.
she had eight pair of orange panties
and one pair that was sort of lemon yellow, none of them
very new. So that was something
to think about. What kind of woman
basically wears only orange panties.”
“She had the most beautiful neck on earth.
A swan’s neck. When we made love, in those first weeks,
in my grubby little graduate student bed-sit,
I’d weep afterward from gratitude while she smoked
and then we’d walk along the embankment to look at the lights
just coming on—it was midsummer—and then we’d eat something
at an Indian place and I’d watch her put forkfuls of curry
into that soft mouth I’d been kissing. It was still
just faintly light at midnight and I’d walk her home
and the wind would be coming up on the river.”
“In theory she was only part-time at Amnesty
but by fall she was there every night, later and later.
She just got to be obsessed. Political torture, mostly.
Abu Ghraib, the photographs. She had every one of them.
And photographs of the hands of some Iranian feminist journalist
that the police had taken pliers to. And Africa,
of course, Darfur, starvation, genital mutilation.
The whole starter kit of anguished causes.”
“I’d wake up in the night
and not hear her sleeper’s breathing
and turn toward her and she ’d be looking at me,
wide-eyed, and say, as if we were in the middle of a conversation,
‘Do you know what the report said? It said
she had been raped multiple times and that she died
of one strong blow—they call it blunt trauma—
to the back of her head,
but she also had twenty-seven hairline fractures
to the skull, so they think the interrogation
went on for some time.’
“—So I said, ‘Yes, I can tell you exactly
what I want.’ She had her head propped up on one elbow,
she was so beautiful, her hair
that Botticellian copper. ‘Look,’ I said,
‘I know the world is an awful place, but I would like,
some night, to make love or walk along the river
without having to talk about George fucking Bush
or Tony fucking Blair.’ I picked up her hand.
‘You bite your fingernails raw.
You should quit smoking. You’re entitled, we ’re entitled
to a little happiness.’ She looked at me,
coolly, and gave me a perfunctory kiss
on the neck and said, ‘You sound like my mother.’”
“We w
ere at a party and she introduced me
to one of her colleagues, tall girl, auburn hair,
absolutely white skin. After she walked away,
I said, ‘A wan English beauty.’ I was really thinking
that she was inside all day breathing secondhand smoke
and saving the world. And she looked at me
for a long time, thoughtfully, and said,
‘Not really. She has lymphoma.’
I think that was the beginning of the end.
I wasn’t being callow, I just didn’t know.”
“Another night she said, ‘Do you know
what our countrymen are thinking about right now?
Football matches.’ ‘Games,’ I said. She shook her head.
‘The drones in Afghanistan? Yesterday they bombed a wedding.
It killed sixty people, eighteen children. I don’t know
how people live, I don’t know how
they get up in the morning.’”
“So she took the job in Harare and I got ready
to come back to Berkeley, and we said we ’d be in touch
by e-mail and that I might come out in the summer
and we’d see how it went. The last night
I was the one who woke up. She was sleeping soundly,
her face adorably squinched up by the pillow,
a little saliva—the English word spittle came to mind—
a tiny filament of it connecting the corner of her mouth
to the pillow. She looked so peaceful.”
“In the last week we went to hear a friend
perform some music of Benjamin Britten.
I had been in the library finishing up, ploughing
through the back issues of The Criterion and noticing
again that neither Eliot nor any of the others
seemed to have had a clue to the coming horror.
