by Robert Hass
She was sitting beside me and I looked at her hands
in her lap. Her beautiful hands. And I thought about
the way she was carrying the whole of the world’s violence
and cruelty in her body, or trying to, because
she thought the rest of us couldn’t or wouldn’t.
our friend was bowing away, a series of high, sweet,
climbing and keening notes, and that line of Eliot’s
from The Wasteland came into my head:
‘This music crept by me upon the waters.’”
SNOWY EGRET
A boy walks out in the morning with a gun.
Bright air, the smell of grass and leaves
and reeds around the pond October smells.
A scent of apples from the orchard in the air.
A smell of ducks. Two cinnamon teal,
he thinks they are teal, the ones he’d seen
the night before as the pond darkened
and he’d thought the thought that the dark
was coming earlier. He is of an age
when the thought of winter is a sexual thought,
the having thoughts of one’s own is sexual,
the two ducks muttering and gliding
toward the deeper reeds away from him,
as if distance were a natural courtesy,
is sexual, which is to say, a mystery, an ache
inside his belly and his chest that rhymes
somehow with the largeness of the night.
The stars conjuring themselves from nothing
but the dark, as if to say it’s not as if
they weren’t all along just where they were,
ached in the suddenly swifter darkening
and glittering and cold. He’s of an age
when the thought of thinking is, at night,
a sexual thought. This morning in the crystal
of the air, dew, and the sunlight that the dew
has caught on the grass blades sparkling at his feet,
he stalks the pond. Three larger ducks,
mallards probably, burst from the reeds
and wheel and fly off south. Three redwings,
gone to their winter muteness, fly three ways
across the pond to settle on three cattails
opposite or crossways from each other,
perch and shiver into place and look around.
That’s when he sees the snowy egret
in the rushes, pure white and stone still
and standing on one leg in that immobile,
perfect, almost princely way. He ’d seen it
often in the summer, often in the morning
and sometimes at dusk, hunting the reeds
under the sumac shadows on the far bank.
He’d watched the slow, wide fanning
of its wings, taking off and landing,
the almost inconceivably slow way
it raised one leg and then another
when it was stalking, the quick cocking
of its head at sudden movement in the water,
and the swift, darting sureness when it stabbed
the water for a stickleback or frog. once
he’d seen it, head up, swallowing a gopher,
its throat bulging, a bit of tail and a trickle
of blood just visible below the black beak.
Now it was still and white in the brightness
of the morning in the reeds. He liked
to practice stalking, and he raised the gun
to his shoulder and crouched in the wet grasses
and drew his bead just playfully at first.
THE RED CHINESE DRAGON AND THE SHADOWS ON HER BODY IN THE MOONLIGHT
L. had returned from a visit to the town
where he had lived for many years
with the wife and in the marriage he was leaving.
His task was to walk through the house
and mark things of his for the movers
(he ’d taken a job in another town)
and those of their common possessions
they had agreed he would take with him
into the new life. His wife had said,
“Take what you want,” and he understood
that she meant by this to say to him
that things were not the cause of her anger
or her hurt. His son, who was a senior
in high school, was also angry
and protective of his mother, who was,
after all, the one being abandoned.
L. understood that. He even thought
that his son’s loyalty to his mother
was a good thing up to a point. The son,
when he’d heard the news, had acted as if
he’d been kicked in the stomach, then flared
and accused his father of selfishness,
of breaking up the family over personal feelings,
but he had also, like young men of his generation,
been raised a feminist and he had made himself
face the fact that, if his mother had a right
to her own life, like Nora in the Ibsen play
his drama class had performed the year before,
so did his father, and that he had to tell him so,
which he did, a week later, and on the phone,
a call L. would also associate with the unreal blue
of the mounded snow outside his new office
with its weather of another world. He arrived
on a Friday afternoon and stayed at a hotel
in the center of town. It was an odd sensation,
and not unpleasant, like the lightness
he had been feeling intermittently since
he’d left some months before, alongside
the heavy & incessant grief. He spent an hour
in his old gym, watching Iraqi women
in black shawls howling over their dead
on TV while he ran between two young women
on treadmills, and thought, as he often thought
those days, of the incommensurability
of kinds of suffering, and afterward,
he walked across the street to a shop
where he ’d sometimes found interesting objects.
There was an old red Chinese dragon
in the window, spangled with yellow
and green, the paint chipped but unfaded,
some kind of water god, he thought,
or river god that saved you from drowning
or caused you to drown, he couldn’t
remember which. on its face there was
an expression of glee, ferocious glee.
He considered buying it as a gift
for his son and decided it was not
a time to touch symbolism he didn’t
understand. That night, as planned, he saw his son
in The Tempest. He ’d sat alone near the back
of the theater and tried not to feel anything
except pleasure in the children and the play,
in which his son’s girlfriend had the part of Miranda
to his Prospero. She was a gamin-faced girl,
wide-browed with ash blond hair, who more than a little
resembled L.’s wife (something they had both remarked,
amused, a year before) and who brought the house down
with Miranda’s line. The audience, L. thought,
in a university town mostly knew it was coming,
but when she stood, flower-bedecked, center stage,
and lifted herself on tiptoe as she said it
in a slightly hoarse and boyish voice, the audience
howled with delight. Afterward they also murmured
audibly when his son, also center stage, adorable
and a little ludicrous in his wispy wizard’s beard,
intoned his line, held out a wooden wand between his hands,
and broke it
with a loud snap to abjure the magic.
L.’s wife sat in the middle of the second row.
He watched her greet many of their casual friends,
colleagues, parents of their son’s friends
he’d sat in the back to avoid having to greet.
He’d brought flowers, and seeing that his wife had, too,
he decided to leave his under his seat. He waved
at his son, unbearded now and milling on stage
with the rest of the cast, gave him a thumbs up,
and drove his rental car back to the hotel.
In the morning, at ten, they’d gone through the house.
His son had answered the door, the three of them
had coffee in the kitchen and talked about the play.
His wife said not much and he concentrated
on ignoring her anger and the devastating sorrow
welling up inside him. Going through the house,
they’d had no issues except for one bowl
that they’d both remembered being the one
to spot in an antique store on the Mendocino road
twenty years before when they were quite poor
and the bowl, earthy, a luminous brown-gold,
from a famous ceramist’s studio in Cornwall,
had been a plunge. (They’d made love
in the upstairs room of a bed-and-breakfast,
he involuntarily remembered, with an ocean view
and at breakfast they had heard Pachelbel’s canon
for the first time with its stunned, slow, stately beauty
and went walking to look for coastal flowers,
lupine and heal-all and vetch, to fill the bowl with,
and then somehow bickered away through the afternoon
while they walked on the storm-littered beach.)
His wife looked at it a long time, arms crossed,
and then shrugged forcefully as if to say, take it
if you want it, since you’ve taken everything else,
and so, nettled by what he thought
was passive-aggressive in her manner, he had.
Later he found there wasn’t a way to describe
to his lover or to his friends the moment
when he turned to his wife to say, again,
how sorry he was, and how she had seen it
coming and raised a palm and said, “Please, don’t,”
and how his son had walked him to the door
and how, sitting in the car outside his house
of many years while his son disappeared inside,
he’d felt unable to move, stuck in some deep well
of dry sorrow, staring at the cold early blossoms
of the plum trees and at the carelessly lovely look
of the gardens his neighbors had, in the West Coast way,
labored over, until shame made him start the car
and drive it to the airport. Home again, in his new apartment
on the other side of the continent, fumbling
for his key in the humid night, he almost tripped
over the cat that came bounding out of the shadows
to greet him. It belonged to his new neighbor,
a professor of philosophy who’d written a book
about lying which he had tried to read
when he was sorting out the evasions and outright lies
his infidelity entailed. The cat was named Cat
and it was blind. It was rubbing its gray flank
against his ankles and purring, looking up at him
and purring and winking its occluded, milky eyes.
She opened the door before he did. She had put on
one of his shirts and was warm and smelled of sleep.
He scooped up the cat and tossed it in the hall
And then he hugged her. When she asked him, only half-awake,
how it had gone, he ’d said, “Fine. Not easy.”
and she had touched his cheek and said, “Poor baby”
and padded down the hall and back to bed.
A few nights later, after they’d made love,
he dozed and woke thinking about his son.
They had tossed off the sheets in the warm room
and when he glanced aside he was startled
to see that her body, curled naked beside him,
lustrous in the moonlight, was crisscrossed
with black shadows from the blinds. His body too.
It made them, made everything, seem vulnerable.
There was a light still on in the kitchen, and he slipped
from bed and walked down the hall to turn it off.
They’d also left the TV on, soldiers in desert camouflage
leaning against a wall. He turned that off, too,
and walked back down the hall, climbed into bed,
covered them both, lay down, and listened to the rhythm
of her breathing. After a while he entered it and slept.
Field Guide
ON THE COAST NEAR SAUSALITO
1.
I won’t say much for the sea,
except that it was, almost,
the color of sour milk.
The sun in that clear
unmenacing sky was low,
angled off the gray fissure of the cliffs,
hills dark green with manzanita.
Low tide: slimed rocks
mottled brown and thick with kelp
merged with the gray stone
of the breakwater, sliding off
to antediluvian depths.
The old story: here filthy life begins.
2.
Fish—
ing, as Melville said,
“to purge the spleen,”
to put to task my clumsy hands
my hands that bruise by
not touching
pluck the legs from a prawn,
peel the shell off,
and curl the body twice about a hook.
3.
The cabezone is not highly regarded
by fishermen, except Italians
who have the grace
to fry the pale, almost bluish flesh
in olive oil with a sprig
of fresh rosemary.
The cabezone, an ugly atavistic fish,
as old as the coastal shelf
it feeds upon
has fins of duck’s-web thickness,
resembles a prehistoric toad,
and is delicately sweet.
Catching one, the fierce quiver of surprise
and the line ’s tension
are a recognition.
4.
But it’s strange to kill
for the sudden feel of life.
The danger is
to moralize
that strangeness.
Holding the spiny monster in my hands
his bulging purple eyes
were eyes and the sun was
almost tangent to the planet
on our uneasy coast.
Creature and creature,
we stared down centuries.
FALL
Amateurs, we gathered mushrooms
near shaggy eucalyptus groves
which smelled of camphor and the fog-soaked earth.
Chanterelles, puffballs, chicken of the woods,
we cooked in wine or butter,
beaten eggs or sour cream,
half-expecting to be
killed by a mistake. “Intense perspiration,”
you said late at night,
quoting the terrifying field guide
while we lay tangled in our sheets and heavy limbs,
“is the first symptom of attack.”
Friends called our aromatic fungi
liebestoads and only ate the ones
that we most certainly survived.
Death shook us more than once
those days and floating back
it felt l
ike life. Earth-wet, slithery,
we drifted toward the names of things.
Spore prints littered our table
like nervous stars. Rotting caps
gave off a musky smell of loam.
MAPS
Sourdough French bread and pinot chardonnay
Apricots—
the downy buttock shape
hard black sculpture of the limbs
on Saratoga hillsides in the rain.
These were the staples of the China trade:
sea otter, sandalwood, and bêche-de-mer
The pointillist look of laurels
their dappled pale green body stirs
down valley in the morning wind
Daphne was supple
my wife is tan, blue-rippled
pale in the dark hollows
Kit Carson in California:
it was the eyes of fish
that shivered in him the tenderness of eyes
he watched the ships come in
at Yerba Buena once, found obscene
the intelligence of crabs
their sidelong crawl, gulls
screeching for white meat,
flounders in tubs, startled
Musky fall—
slime of a saffron milkcap
the mottled amanita
delicate phallic toxic
How odd
the fruity warmth of zinfandel
geometries of “rational viticulture”
Plucked from algae sea spray
cold sun and a low rank tide
sea cucumbers
lolling in the crevices of rock
they traded men enough
to carve old Crocker’s railway out of rock
to eat these slugs
bêche-de-mer
The night they bombed Hanoi
we had been drinking red pinot
that was winter the walnut tree was bare
and the desert ironwood where waxwings
perched in spring drunk on pyracantha
squalls headwinds days gone
north on the infelicitous Pacific
The bleak intricate erosion of these cliffs
seas grown bitter
with the salt of continents
Jerusalem artichokes
raised on sandy bluffs at San Gregorio
near reedy beaches where the steelhead ran
Coast range runoff turned salt creek
in the heat and indolence of August
That purple in the hills
