by Robert Hass
you are coming back. Meanwhile
we are passing through the gate
with everything we love. We go
as fire, as flesh, as marble.
Sometimes it is good and sometimes
it is dangerous like the ignorance
of particulars, but our words are clear
and our movements give off light.
TRANSPARENT GARMENTS
Because it is neither easy nor difficult,
because the other dark is not passport
nor is the inner dark, the horror
held in memory as talisman. Not to go in
stupidly holding out dark as some
wrong promise of fidelity, but to go in
as one can, empty or worshipping.
White, as a proposition. Not leprous
by easy association nor painfully radiant.
or maybe that, yes, maybe painfully.
To go into that. As: I am walking in the city
and there is the whiteness of the houses,
little cubes of it bleaching in the sunlight,
luminous with attritions of light, the failure
of matter in the steadiness of light,
a purification, not burning away,
nothing so violent, something clearer
that stings and stings and is then
past pain or this slow levitation of joy.
And to emerge, where the juniper
is simply juniper and there is the smell
of new shingle, a power saw outside
and inside a woman in the bath,
a scent of lemon and a drift of song,
a heartfelt imitation of Bessie Smith.
The given, as in given up
or given out, as in testimony.
THE IMAGE
The child brought blue clay from the creek
and the woman made two figures: a lady and a deer.
At that season deer came down from the mountain
and fed quietly in the redwood canyons.
The woman and the child regarded the figure of the lady,
the crude roundness, the grace, the coloring like shadow.
They were not sure where she came from,
except the child’s fetching and the woman’s hands
and the lead-blue clay of the creek
where the deer sometimes showed themselves at sundown.
THE FEAST
The lovers loitered on the deck talking,
the men who were with men and the men who were with new women,
a little shrill and electric, and the wifely women
who had repose and beautifully lined faces
and coppery skin. She had taken the turkey from the oven
and her friends were talking on the deck
in the steady sunshine. She imagined them
drifting toward the food, in small groups, finishing
sentences, lifting a pickle or a sliver of turkey,
nibbling a little with unconscious pleasure. And
she imagined setting it out artfully, the white meat,
the breads, antipasti, the mushrooms and salad
arranged down the oak counter cleanly, and how they all came
as in a dance when she called them. She carved meat
and then she was crying. Then she was in darkness
crying. She didn’t know what she wanted.
THE PURE ONES
Roads to the north of here are dry.
First red buds prick out the lethal spring
and corncrakes, swarming, lower in clouds
above the fields from Paris to Béziers.
This is God’s harvest: the village boy
whose tongue was sliced in two,
the village crones slashing cartilage
at the knees to crawl to Carcassonne.
—If the world were not evil in itself,
the blessed one said, then every choice
would not constitute a loss.
This sickness of this age is flesh,
he said. Therefore we build with stone.
The dead with their black lips are heaped
on one another, intimate as lovers.
THE GARDEN OF DELIGHT
The floor hurts so much it whines
whichever way they step,
as if it had learned the trick
of suffering.
Poor floor.
This is the garden of delight,
a man pointing at a woman
and a bird perched
on a cylinder of crystal
watching. She has a stopper
in her mouth or the paint
has blistered, long ago, just there.
He looks worried, but not terrified,
not terrified, and he doesn’t move.
It’s an advantage of paintings.
You don’t have to.
I used to name the flowers—
beard tongue, stonecrop,
pearly everlasting.
SANTA LUCIA
I.
Art & love: he camps outside my door,
innocent, carnivorous. As if desire
were actually a flute, as if the little song
transcend, transcend could get you anywhere.
He brings me wine; he believes in the arts
and uses them for beauty. He brings me
vinegar in small earthen pots, postcards
of the hillsides by Cézanne desire has left
alone, empty farms in August and the vague
tall chestnut trees at Jas de Bouffan, fetal
sandstone rifted with mica from the beach.
He brings his body, wolfish, frail,
all brown for summer like croissant crusts
at La Seine in the Marina, the bellies
of pelicans I watched among white dunes
under Pico Blanco on the Big Sur coast.
It sickens me, this glut & desperation.
II.
Walking the Five Springs trail, I tried to think.
Dead-nettle, thimbleberry. The fog heaved in
between the pines, violet sparrows made curves
like bodies in the ruined air. All women
are masochists. I was so young, believing
every word they said. Dürer is second-rate.
Dürer’s Eve feeds her apple to the snake;
snaky tresses, cat at her feet, at Adam’s foot
a mouse. Male fear, male eyes and art. The art
of love, the eyes I use to see myself
in love. Ingres, pillows. I think the erotic
is not sexual, only when you’re lucky.
That’s where the path forks. It’s not the riddle
of desire that interests me; it is the riddle
of good hands, chervil in a windowbox,
the white pages of a book, someone says
I’m tired, someone turning on the light.
III.
Streaked in the window, the city wavers
but the sky is empty, clean. Emptiness
is strict; that pleases me. I do cry out.
Like everyone else, I thrash, am splayed.
oh, oh, oh, oh. Eyes full of wonder.
Guernica. Ulysses on the beach. I see
my body is his prayer. I see my body.
Walking in the galleries at the Louvre,
I was, each moment, naked & possessed.
Tourists gorged on goosenecked Florentine girls
by Pollaiuolo. He sees me like a painter.
I hear his words for me: white, gold.
I’d rather walk the city in the rain.
Dog shit, traffic accidents. Whatever god
there is dismembered in his Chevy.
A different order of religious awe:
agony & meat, everything plain afterward.
IV.
Santa Lucia: eyes jellied on a plate.
The thrust of serpentine was almost green
&nbs
p; all through the mountains where the rock cropped out.
I liked sundowns, dusks smelling of madrone,
the wildflowers, which were not beautiful,
fierce little wills rooting in the yellow
grass year after year, thirst in the roots,
mineral. They have intelligence
of hunger. Poppies lean to the morning sun,
lupine grows thick in the rockface, self-heal
at creekside. He wants to fuck. Sweet word.
All suction. I want less. Not that I fear
the huge dark of sex, the sharp sweet light,
light if it were water raveling, rancor,
tenderness like rain. What I want happens
not when the deer freezes in the shade
and looks at you and you hold very still
and meet her gaze but in the moment after
when she flicks her ears & starts to feed again.
TO A READER
I’ve watched memory wound you.
I felt nothing but envy.
Having slept in wet meadows,
I was not through desiring.
Imagine January and the beach,
a bleached sky, gulls. And
look seaward: what is not there
is there, isn’t it, the huge
bird of the first light
arched above first waters
beyond our touching or intention
or the reasonable shore.
THE ORIGIN OF CITIES
She is first seen dancing which is a figure
not for art or prayer or the arousal of desire
but for action simply; her breastband is copper,
her crown imitates the city walls. Though she draws us
to her, like a harbor or a river mouth she sends us away.
A figure of the outward. So the old men grown lazy
in patrician ways lay out cash for adventures.
Imagining a rich return, they buy futures
and their slaves haunt the waterfront for news of ships.
The young come from the villages dreaming.
Pleasure and power draw them. They are employed
to make inventories and grow very clever,
multiplying in their heads, deft at the use of letters.
When they are bored, they write down old songs from the villages,
and the cleverest make new songs in the old forms
describing the pleasures of the city, their mistresses,
old shepherds and simpler times. And the temple
where the farmer grandfathers of the great merchants worshipped,
the dim temple across from the marketplace
which was once a stone altar in a clearing in the forest,
where the nightwatch pisses now against a column in the moonlight,
is holy to them; the wheat mother their goddess of sweaty sheets,
of what is left in the air when that glimpsed beauty
turns the corner, of love ’s punishment and the wracking
of desire. They make songs about that. They tell
stories of heroes and brilliant lust among the gods.
These are amusements. She dances, the ships go forth,
slaves and peasants labor in the fields, maimed soldiers
ape monkeys for coins outside the wineshops,
the craftsmen work in bronze and gold, accounts
are kept carefully, what goes out, what returns.
WINTER MORNING IN CHARLOTTESVILLE
Lead skies
and gothic traceries of poplar.
In the sacrament of winter
Savonarola raged against the carnal word.
Inside the prism of that eloquence
even Botticelli renounced the bestial gods
and beauty.
Florentine vanity
gathers in the dogwood buds.
How sexual
this morning is the otherwise
quite plain
white-crowned sparrow’s
plumed head!
By a natural
selection, the word
originates its species,
the blood flowers,
republics scrawl their hurried declarations
& small birds scavenge
in the chaste late winter grass.
OLD DOMINION
The shadows of late afternoon and the odors
of honeysuckle are a congruent sadness.
Everything is easy but wrong. I am walking
across thick lawns under maples in borrowed tennis whites.
It is like the photographs of Randall Jarrell
I stared at on the backs of books in college.
He looked so sad and relaxed in the pictures.
He was translating Chekhov and wore tennis whites.
It puzzled me that in his art, like Chekhov’s,
everyone was lost, that the main chance was never seized
because it is only there as a thing to be dreamed of
or because someone somewhere had set the old words
to the old tune: we live by habit and it doesn’t hurt.
Now the thwack…thwack of tennis balls being hit
reaches me and it is the first sound of an ax
in the cherry orchard or the sound of machine guns
where the young terrorists are exploding
among poor people on the streets of Los Angeles.
I begin making resolutions: to take risks, not to stay
in the south, to somehow do honor to Randall Jarrell,
never to kill myself. Through the oaks I see the courts,
the nets, the painted boundaries, and the people in tennis
whites who look so graceful from this distance.
MONTICELLO
Snow is falling
on the age of reason, on Tom Jefferson’s
little hill & on the age of sensibility.
Jane Austen isn’t walking in the park,
she considers that this gray crust
of an horizon will not do;
she is by the fire, reading William Cowper,
and Jefferson, if he isn’t dead,
has gone down to Kmart
to browse among the gadgets:
pulleys, levers, the separation of powers.
I try to think of history: the mammoth
jawbone in the entry hall,
Napoléon in marble,
Meriwether Lewis dead at Grinder’s Trace.
I don’t want the powers separated,
one wing for Governor Randolph when he comes,
the other wing for love,
private places
in the public weal
that ache against the teeth like ice.
outside this monument, the snow
catches, star-shaped,
in the vaginal leaves of old magnolias.
EMBLEMS OF A PRIOR ORDER
(For Louise)
Patient cultivation,
as the white petals of
the climbing rose
were to some man
a lifetime’s careful work,
the mess of petals
on the lawn was bred
to fall there as a dog
is bred to stand—
gardens are a history
of art, this fin de siècle
flower & Dobermann’s
pinscher, all deadly
sleekness in the neighbor’s
yard, were born, brennende
liebe, under the lindens
that bear the morning
toward us on a silver tray.
WEED
Horse is Lorca’s word, fierce as wind,
or melancholy, gorgeous, Andalusian:
white horse grazing near the river dust;
and parsnip is hopeless,
second cousin to the rhubarb
which is already second cousin
to an apple pie. Marrying the words
to the coarse white umbels sprouting
on the first of May is history
but conveys nothing; it is not the veined
body of Queen Anne’s lace
I found, bored, in a spring classroom
from which I walked hands tingling
for the breasts that are meadows in New Jersey
in 1933; it is thick, shaggier, and the name
is absurd. It speaks of durable
unimaginative pleasures: reading Balzac,
fixing the window sash, rising
to a clean kitchen, the fact
that the car starts & driving to work
through hills where the roadside thickens
with the green ungainly stalks,
the bracts and bright white flowerets
of horse-parsnips.
CHILD NAMING FLOWERS
When old crones wandered in the woods,
I was the hero on the hill
in clear sunlight.
Death’s hounds feared me.
Smell of wild fennel,
high loft of sweet fruit high in the branches
of the flowering plum.
Then I am cast down
into the terror of childhood,
into the mirror and the greasy knives,
the dark
woodpile under the fig trees
in the dark.
It is only
the malice of voices, the old horror
that is nothing, parents
quarreling, somebody
drunk.
I don’t know how we survive it.
on this sunny morning
in my life as an adult, I am looking
at one clear pure peach
in a painting by Georgia O’Keeffe.
It is all the fullness that there is
in light. A towhee scratches in the leaves
outside my open door.
He always does.
A moment ago I felt so sick
and so cold
I could hardly move.
PICKING BLACKBERRIES WITH A FRIEND WHO HAS BEEN READING JACQUES LACAN
August is dust here. Drought
stuns the road,
but juice gathers in the berries.
We pick them in the hot
