by Robert Hass
owl’s clover stiffening the lupine
while the white flowers of the pollinated plant
seep red
the eye owns what is familiar
felt along the flesh
“an amethystine tinge”
Chants, recitations:
Olema
Tamalpais Mariposa
Mendocino Sausalito San Rafael
Emigrant Gap
Donner Pass
of all the laws
that bind us to the past
the names of things are
stubbornest
Late summer—
red berries darken the hawthorns
curls of yellow in the laurels
your body and the undulant
sharp edges of the hills
Clams, abalones, cockles, chitons, crabs
Ishi
in San Francisco, 1911:
it was not the sea he wondered at
that inland man who saw the salmon
die to spawn and fed his dwindling people
from their rage to breed
it was the thousands of white bodies
on the beach
“Hansi saltu…” so many
ghosts
The long ripple in the swamp grass
is a skunk
he shuns the day
ADHESIVE: FOR EARLENE
How often we overslept
those gray enormous mornings
in the first year of marriage
and found that rain and wind
had scattered palm nuts,
palm leaves, and sweet rotting crab apples
across our wildered lawn.
By spring your belly was immense
and your coloring a high rosy almond.
We were so broke
we debated buying thumbtacks
at the Elmwood Dime Store
knowing cellophane tape would do.
Berkeley seemed more innocent
in those flush days
when we skipped lunch
to have the price of Les Enfants du Paradis.
BOOKBUYING IN THE TENDERLOIN
A statuary Christ bleeds sweating grief
in the Gethsemane garden of St. Boniface Church
where empurpled Irish winos lurch
to their salvation. When incense and belief
will not suffice: ruby port in the storm
of muscatel-made images of hell
the city spews at their shuffling feet.
In the Longshoreman’s Hall across the street,
three decades have unloaded since the fight
to oust the manic Trotskyite
screwballs from the brotherhood. All goes well
since the unions closed their ranks,
boosted their pensions, and hired the banks
to manage funds for the workingman’s cartel.
Christ in plaster, the unions minting coin,
old hopes converge upon the Tenderloin
where Comte, Considérant, Fourier
are thick with dust in the two-bit tray
of cavernous secondhand bookstores
and the streets suffuse the ten-cent howl
of jukebox violence, just this side of blues.
Negro boy-whores in black tennis shoes
prowl in front of noisy hustler bars.
Like Samuel Gompers, they want more
on this street where every other whore
is painfully skinny, wears a bouffant,
and looks like a brown slow-blooming annual flower.
In the places that I haunt, no power
to transform the universal squalor
nor wisdom to withstand the thin wrists
of the girls who sell their bodies for a dollar
or two, the price of a Collected Maeterlinck.
The sky glowers. My God, it is a test,
this riding out the dying of the West.
SPRING
We bought great ornamental oranges,
Mexican cookies, a fragrant yellow tea.
Browsed the bookstores. You
asked mildly, “Bob, who is Ugo Betti?”
A bearded birdlike man
(he looked like a Russian priest
with imperial bearing
and a black ransacked raincoat)
turned to us, cleared
his cultural throat, and
told us both interminably
who Ugo Betti was. The slow
filtering of sun through windows
glazed to gold the silky hair
along your arms. Dusk was
a huge weird phosphorescent beast
dying slowly out across the bay.
our house waited and our books,
the skinny little soldiers on the shelves.
After dinner I read one anyway.
You chanted, “Ugo Betti has no bones,”
and when I said, “The limits of my language
are the limits of my world,” you laughed.
We spoke all night in tongues,
in fingertips, in teeth.
SONG
Afternoon cooking in the fall sun—
who is more naked
than the man
yelling, “Hey, I’m home!”
to an empty house?
thinking because the bay is clear,
the hills in yellow heat,
& scrub oak red in gullies
that great crowds of family
should tumble from the rooms
to throw their bodies on the Papa-body,
I-am-loved.
Cat sleeps in the windowgleam,
dust motes.
on the oak table
filets of sole
stewing in the juice of tangerines,
slices of green pepper
on a bone-white dish.
PALO ALTO: THE MARSHES
For Mariana Richardson (1830–1891)
1.
She dreamed along the beaches of this coast.
Here where the tide rides in to desolate
the sluggish margins of the bay,
sea grass sheens copper into distances.
Walking, I recite the hard
explosive names of birds:
egret, killdeer, bittern, tern.
Dull in the wind and early morning light,
the striped shadows of the cattails
twitch like nerves.
2.
Mud, roots, old cartridges, and blood.
High overhead, the long silence of the geese.
3.
“We take no prisoners,” John Frémont said
and took California for President Polk.
That was the Bear Flag War.
She watched it from the Mission San Rafael,
named for the archangel (the terrible one)
who gently laid a fish across the eyes
of saintly, miserable Tobias
that he might see.
The eyes of fish. The land
shimmers fearfully.
No archangels here, no ghosts,
and terns rise like seafoam
from the breaking surf.
4.
Kit Carson’s antique .45, blue,
new as grease. The roar
flings up echoes,
row on row of shrieking avocets.
The blood of Francisco de Haro,
Ramón de Haro, José de los Reyes Berryessa
runs darkly to the old ooze.
5.
The star thistles: erect, surprised,
6.
and blooming
violet caterpillar hairs. one
of the de Haros was her lover,
the books don’t say which.
They were twins.
7.
In California in the early spring
there are pale yellow mornings
when the mist burns slowly into day.
The air stings
like
autumn, clarifies
like pain.
8.
Well I have dreamed this coast myself.
Dreamed Mariana, since her father owned the land
where I grew up. I saw her picture once:
a wraith encased in a high-necked black silk
dress so taut about the bones there were hardly ripples
for the light to play in. I knew her eyes
had watched the hills seep blue with lupine after rain,
seen the young peppers, heavy and intent,
first rosy drupes and then the acrid fruit,
the ache of spring. Black as her hair
the unreflecting venom of those eyes
is an aftermath I know, like these brackish,
russet pools a strange life feeds in
or the old fury of land grants, maps,
and deeds of trust. A furious dun-
colored mallard knows my kind
and skims across the edges of the marsh
where the dead bass surface
and their flaccid bellies bob.
9.
A chill tightens the skin
around my bones. The other California
and its bitter absent ghosts
dance to a stillness in the air:
the Klamath tribe was routed and they disappeared.
Even the dust seemed stunned,
tools on the ground, fishnets.
Fires crackled, smouldering.
No movement but the slow turning
of the smoke, no sounds but jays
shrill in the distance and flying further off.
The flicker of lizards, dragonflies.
And beyond the dry flag-woven lodges
a faint persistent slapping.
Carson found ten wagonloads
of fresh-caught salmon, silver
in the sun. The flat eyes stared.
Gills sucking the thin annulling air.
They flopped and shivered,
ten wagonloads. Kit Carson
burned the village to the ground.
They rode some twenty miles that day
and still they saw the black smoke
smear the sky above the pines.
10.
Here everything seems clear,
firmly etched against the pale
smoky sky: sedge, flag, owl’s clover,
rotting wharves. A tanker lugs silver
bomb-shaped napalm tins toward
port at Redwood City. Again,
my eye performs
the lobotomy of description.
Again, almost with yearning,
I see the malice of her ancient eyes.
The mud flats hiss as the tide turns.
They say she died in Redwood City,
cursing “the goddammed Anglo-Yankee yoke.”
11.
The otters are gone from the bay
and I have seen five horses
easy in the grassy marsh
beside three snowy egrets.
Bird cries and the unembittered sun,
wings and the white bodies of the birds,
it is morning. Citizens are rising
to murder in their moral dreams.
CONCERNING THE AFTERLIFE, THE INDIANS OF CENTRAL CALIFORNIA HAD ONLY THE DIMMEST NOTIONS
It is morning because the sun has risen.
I wake slowly in the early heat,
pick berries from the thorny vines.
They are deep red,
sugar-heavy, fuzzed with dust.
The eucalyptus casts a feathered shadow
on the house, which gradually withdraws.
After breakfast
you will swim and I am going to read
that hard man Thomas Hobbes
on the causes of the English civil wars.
There are no women in his world,
Hobbes, brothers fighting brothers
over goods.
I see you in the later afternoon
your hair dry-yellow, plaited
from the waves, a faint salt sheen
across your belly and along your arms.
The kids bring from the sea
intricate calcium gifts—
black turbans, angular green whelks,
the whorled opalescent unicorn.
We may or may not
feel some irritation at the dinner hour.
The first stars, and after dark
Vega hangs in the lyre,
the Dipper tilts above the hill.
Traveling
in Europe Hobbes was haunted by motion.
Sailing or riding, he was suddenly aware
that all things move.
We will lie down,
finally, in our heaviness
and touch and drift toward morning.
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY AS A SONG
“How like a well-kept garden is your soul.”
John Gray’s translation of Verlaine
& Baudelaire’s butcher in 1861
shorted him four centimes
on a pound of tripe.
He thought himself a clever man
and, wiping the calves’ blood from his beefy hands,
gazed briefly at what Tennyson called
“the sweet blue sky.”
It was a warm day.
What clouds there were
were made of sugar tinged with blood.
They shed, faintly, amid the clatter of carriages
new settings of the songs
Moravian virgins sang on wedding days.
The poet is a monarch of the clouds
& Swinburne on his northern coast
“trod,” he actually wrote, “by no tropic foot,”
composed that lovely elegy
and then found out Baudelaire was still alive
whom he had lodged dreamily
in a “deep division of prodigious breasts.”
Surely the poet is monarch of the clouds.
He hovers, like a lemon-colored kite,
over spring afternoons in the nineteenth century
while Marx in the library gloom
studies the birth rate of the weavers of Tilsit
and that gentle man Bakunin,
home after fingerfucking the countess,
applies his numb hands
to the making of bombs.
MEASURE
Recurrences.
Coppery light hesitates
again in the small-leaved
Japanese plum. Summer
and sunset, the peace
of the writing desk
and the habitual peace
of writing, these things
form an order I only
belong to in the idleness
of attention. Last light
rims the blue mountain
and I almost glimpse
what I was born to,
not so much in the sunlight
or the plum tree
as in the pulse
that forms these lines.
APPLICATIONS OF THE DOCTRINE
That professor of French,
trying to start his car
among the innocent snowdrifts,
is the author of a famous book
on the self.
The self is probably an illusion
and language the structure of illusions.
The self is beguiled, anyway,
by this engine of thought.
The self shuffles cards
with absurd dexterity.
The deck includes
an infinite number
of one-eyed jacks.
on warm days
he knows he should marry Being,
a nice girl, steady
but relentless.
The self has agreed to lecture
before a psychoanalytic study group.
on the appointed day he
does not appear, thereby
meeting his obligation
.
The self grants an audience
to the Pope.
They talk shop.
The snark is writing a novel
called The Hunting of the Self.
The self is composing a monograph
on the frames of antique mirrors.
The self botanizes.
He dreams of breeding, one day,
an odorless narcissus.
There is a girl the self loves.
She has been trying to study him for days
but her mind keeps
wandering.
HOUSE
Quick in the April hedge
were juncos and kinglets.
I was at the window
just now, the bacon
sizzled under hand,
the coffee steamed
fragrantly & fountains
of the Water Music
issued from another room.
Living in a house
we live in the body
of our lives, last night
the odd after-dinner light
of early spring & now
the sunlight warming or
shadowing the morning rooms.
I am conscious of being
myself the inhabitant
of certain premises:
coffee & bacon & Handel
& upstairs asleep my wife.
very suddenly
old dusks break over me,
the thick shagged heads
of fig trees near the fence
& not wanting to go in
& swallows looping
on the darkened hill
& all that terror
in the house
& barely, only barely,
a softball
falling toward me
like a moon.
IN WEATHER
1.
What I wanted
in the pearly repetitions of February
was vision. All winter,
grieved and dull,
I hungered for it.
Sundays I looked for lightningstricken
trees
in the slow burning of the afternoon
to cut them down, split
the dry centers,
and kindle from their death
