by Robert Hass
It’s only your feeling you assuage.
You didn’t interfere. Her gold wandering of hair,
she told you that another time. The father
at the county fair was whaling on the boy
with fists. There was music in the background
and a clown walked by and looked and looked away.
She told you then, gold and practical advice.
You wanted one and craved the other.
Say “mother.” No. Say it. No. She shut the door?
I wish she had. I saw the shadow cast there
on the floor. What did you think? I asked her,
actually. She said she hurt her lip. And
took a drink? or the shadow did. I didn’t think.
I knew she was lying. A child could see that.
You were a child. Ah, this is the part
where he parades his wound. He was a child.
It is the law of things: the little billy goat
goes first. Happily, he ’s not a morsel
for the troll. Say “Dad, I’ve got a bite.”
That’s different. Then you say, “Reel it in.”
They’re feeling fear and wonder, then.
That’s when you teach them they can take the world
in hand. You do? Sometimes I do. Carefully.
They beat the child again when they get home.
All right. Assume the children are all right.
They’re singing in the kibbutzim. The sun is rising.
Let’s get past this part. The kindergarten
is a garden and they face their fears in stories
your voice makes musical and then they sleep.
They hear the sirens? Yes, they hear the sirens.
That part can’t be helped. No one beats them, though.
And there are no lies they recognize. They know
you’re with them and they fall asleep. What then?
Get past this part. It is a garden. Then they’re grown.
What then? Say “groan.” I say what to say,
you don’t. They’re all OK, and grown. What then?
2.
Then? Then, the truth is, then they fall in love.
oh no. Oh yes. Big subject. Big shadow.
I saw it slant across the floor, linoleum
in fact, and very dirty. Sad and dirty.
Because it lacked intention? Well, it did lack art.
Let’s leave the shadow part alone. They fall in love.
What then? I want to leave this too.
It has its songs. Too many. I know them all.
It doesn’t seem appropriate somehow. It was summer.
He saw her wandering through a field of grass.
It was the sweetest fire. Later, in the fall, it rained.
You loved her then? In rain? and gold October?
I would have died for her. Tra-la. oh yes,
tra-la. We took long walks. You gather sadness
from a childhood to make a gift of it.
I gave her mine. Some gift. Is it so bad?
Sadness is a pretty word. Shadow’s
shadow. And once there was a flood. Heavy rains,
and then the tide came in. I left her house
at midnight. It was pouring. I hitched a ride,
which stalled. The car in front of us had stopped.
The water rose across the road and ran downhill.
You’d forgotten this. I remember now. My knee
was in a cast. I hopped to the car in front,
the one that stalled. The driver’s tongue stuck out,
a pale fat plum. His eyes bulged. An old man
in a gray felt hat. And the red lids flickered,
so he wasn’t dead. What did you do? Got in,
shoved him aside, and tried to start the car.
What did you feel then? Wonderful. Like cleaning fish.
Your hands are bloody and you do the job.
It reminds you of a poem now? Yes,
the one about the fall that Bashō liked.
“The maple leaf becomes a midwife ’s hand.”
The engine skipped and sank, twice. Then it started.
And I drove. The hospital was just a mile away
but near the creek. I thought the water
would be even higher. Interesting, of course.
This is the part about falling in love?
I left her house. We were necking, remember,
on a soft green velvet couch. What then?
I took the downhill road and floored it.
A gush spewed up and blurred the windshield.
I couldn’t see a thing. The car sputtered,
surged, sputtered, surged, and died. And
he was dead. Who was he? Some old man.
That was the winter that you fell in love?
It was. Did you feel bad? No, I tried.
Do you believe in that? Now? I’m not sure.
He looked like a baby when they got him out
and raindrops bounced off raindrops on his face.
It didn’t cost me anything.
Anything?
PRIVILEGE OF BEING
Many are making love. Up above, the angels
in the unshaken ether and crystal of human longing
are braiding one another’s hair, which is strawberry blond
and the texture of cold rivers. They glance
down from time to time at the awkward ecstasy—
it must look to them like featherless birds
splashing in the spring puddle of a bed—
and then one woman, she is about to come,
peels back the man’s shut eyelids and says,
look at me, and he does. or is it the man
tugging the curtain rope in that dark theater?
Anyway, they do, they look at each other;
two beings with evolved eyes, rapacious,
startled, connected at the belly in an unbelievably sweet
lubricious glue, stare at each other,
and the angels are desolate. They hate it. They shudder pathetically
like lithographs of Victorian beggars
with perfect features and alabaster skin hawking rags
in the lewd alleys of the novel.
All of creation is offended by this distress.
It is like the keening sound the moon makes sometimes,
rising. The lovers especially cannot bear it,
it fills them with unspeakable sadness, so that
they close their eyes again and hold each other, each
feeling the mortal singularity of the body
they have enchanted out of death for an hour or so,
and one day, running at sunset, the woman says to the man,
I woke up feeling so sad this morning because I realized
that you could not, as much as I love you,
dear heart, cure my loneliness,
wherewith she touched his cheek to reassure him
that she did not mean to hurt him with this truth.
And the man is not hurt exactly,
he understands that life has limits, that people
die young, fail at love,
fail of their ambitions. He runs beside her, he thinks
of the sadness they have gasped and crooned their way out of
coming, clutching each other with old, invented
forms of grace and clumsy gratitude, ready
to be alone again, or dissatisfied, or merely
companionable like the couples on the summer beach
reading magazine articles about intimacy between the sexes
to themselves, and to each other,
and to the immense, illiterate, consoling angels.
NATURAL THEOLOGY
White daisies against the burnt orange of the windowframe,
lusterless redwood in the nickel gray of winter,
in the distance turbulence of water—the green regions
of the morn
ing reflect whatever can be gained, normally,
by light, then give way to the blue regions of the afternoon
which do not reflect so much as they remember,
as if the light, one will all morning, yielded to a doubleness
in things—plucked skins of turkeys in an ill-lit butchershop
in the pitch-dark forenoon of a dreary day, or a stone bridge
in a small town, a cool café, tables with a violin-back sheen,
ferns like private places of the body distanced and made cool—
images not quite left behind rising as an undertow
of endless transformation against the blurring world
outside the window where, after the morning clarities,
the faint reflection of a face appears; among the images
a road, repetitively, with meadow rue and yarrow
whitening its edges, and pines shadowing the cranberry brush,
and the fluting of one bird where the road curves and disappears,
becoming that gap or lack which is the oldest imagination
of need, defined more sharply by the silver-gray region
just before the sun goes down and the clouds fade
through rose to bruise to the city-pigeon color of a sky
going dark and the wind comes up in brushstroke silhouettes
of trees and to your surprise the window mirrors back to you
a face open, curious, and tender; as dance is defined
by the body’s possibilities arranged, this dance
belongs to the composures and the running down of things
in the used sugars of five thirty: a woman straightening
a desk turns her calendar to another day, signaling
that it is another day where the desk is concerned
and that there is in her days what doesn’t belong to the desk;
a kid turns on TV, flops on the couch to the tinny sound
of little cartoon parents quarreling; a man in a bar
orders a drink, watches ice bob in the blond fluid,
he sighs and looks around; sad at the corners, nagged by wind,
others with packages; others dreaming, picking their noses
dreamily while they listen to the radio describe configurations
of the traffic they are stuck in as the last light
like held breath flickers among mud hens on the bay,
the black bodies elapsing as the dark comes on, and the face
in the window seems harder and more clear. The religion
or the region of the dark makes soup and lights a fire,
plays backgammon with children on the teeth or the stilettos
of the board, reads books, does dishes, listens
to the wind, listens to the stars imagined to be singing
invisibly, goes out to be regarded by the moon, walks
dogs, feeds cats, makes love in postures so various,
with such varying attention and intensity and hope,
it enacts the dispersion of tongues among the people
of the earth—compris? Versteh’—and sleeps with sticky genitals
the erasures and the peace of sleep: exactly the half-moon
holds, and the city twinkles in particular windows, throbs
in its accumulated glow which is also and more blindingly
the imagination of need from which the sun keeps rising into morning light,
because desires do not split themselves up, there is one desire
touching the many things, and it is continuous.
TAHOE IN AUGUST
What summer proposes is simply happiness:
heat early in the morning, jays
raucous in the pines. Frank and Ellen have a tennis game
at nine, Bill and Cheryl sleep on the deck
to watch a shower of summer stars. Nick and Sharon
stayed in, sat and talked the dark on,
drinking tea, and Jeanne walked into the meadow
in a white smock to write in her journal
by a grazing horse who seemed to want the company.
Some of them will swim in the afternoon.
Someone will drive to the hardware store to fetch
new latches for the kitchen door. Four o’clock;
the joggers jogging—it is one of them who sees
down the flowering slope the woman with her notebook
in her hand beside the white horse, gesturing, her hair
from a distance the copper color of the hummingbirds
the slant light catches on the slope; the hikers
switchback down the canyon from the waterfall;
the readers are reading, Anna is about to meet Vronsky,
that nice M. Swann is dining in Combray
with the aunts, and Carrie has come to Chicago.
What they want is happiness: someone to love them,
children, a summer by the lake. The woman who sets aside
her book blinks against the fuzzy dark,
reentering the house. Her daughter drifts downstairs;
out late the night before, she has been napping,
and she ’s cross. Her mother tells her David telephoned.
“He’s such a dear,” the mother says, “I think
I make him nervous.” The girl tosses her head as the horse
had done in the meadow while Jeanne read it her dream.
“You can call him now, if you want,” the mother says,
“I’ve got to get the chicken started,
I won’t listen.” “Did I say you would?”
the girl says quickly. The mother who has been slapped
this way before and done the same herself another summer
on a different lake says, “ouch.” The girl shrugs
sulkily. “I’m sorry.” Looking down: “Something
about the way you said that pissed me off.”
“Hannibal has wandered off,” the mother says,
wryness in her voice, she is thinking it is August,
“why don’t you see if he ’s at the Finleys’ house
again.” The girl says, “God.” The mother: “He loves
small children. It’s livelier for him there.”
The daughter, awake now, flounces out the door,
which slams. It is for all of them the sound of summer.
The mother she looks like stands at the counter snapping beans.
THIN AIR
What if I did not mention death to get started
or how love fails in our well-meaning hands
or what my parents in the innocence of their malice
toward each other did to me. What if I let the light
pour down on the mountain meadow, mule ears
dry already in the August heat, and the sweet
heavy scent of sage rising into it, marrying
what light it can, a wartime marriage,
summer is brief in these mountains, the
ticker-tape parade of snow will bury it
in no time, in the excess the world gives
up there, and down here, you want snow? you think
you have seen infinity watching the sky shuffle
the pink cards of thirty thousand flamingoes
on the Serengeti Plain? this is my blush,
she said, turning toward you, eyes downcast
demurely, a small smile playing at her mouth,
playing what? house, playing I am the sister
and author of your sorrow, playing the Lord
God loves the green earth and I am a nun
of his visitations, you want snow, I’ll give you
snow, she said, this is my flamingoes-in-migration
blush. Winter will bury it. You had better
sleep through that cold, or sleep in a solitary bed
in a city where the stone glistens darkly
in the morning rain, you are allowed a comforter,
silky in texture t
hough it must be blue,
and you can listen to music in the morning,
the notes nervous as light reflected in a fountain,
and you can drink your one cup of fragrant tea
and rinse the cup and sweep your room and
the sadness you are fighting off while the gulls’
calls beat about the church towers out the window
and you smell the salt smell of the sea
is the dream you don’t remember of the meadow
sleeping under fifteen feet of snow though you half
recall the tracks of some midsized animal,
a small fox or a large hare, and the deadly
silence, and the blinded-eye gray of the winter sky:
it is sleeping, the meadow, don’t wake it.
You have to go to the bottom of the raveling.
The surgical pan, and the pump, and the bits
of life that didn’t take floating in the smell
of alcohol, or the old man in the bed spitting up
black blood like milk of the other world, or the way
middle-aged women from poorer countries are the ones
who clean up after and throw the underwear away.
Hang on to the luxury of the way she used
to turn to you, don’t abandon it, summer
is short, no one ever told you differently,
this is a good parade, this is the small hotel,
the boathouse on the dock, and the moon thin,
just silvering above the pines, and you are starting
to sweat now, having turned north out of the meadow
and begun the ascent up granite and through buckthorn
to the falls. There is a fine film on your warm skin
that you notice. You are water, light and water and thin air,
and you’re breathing deeply now—a little dead marmot
like a rag of auburn hair swarms with ants beside the trail—
and you can hear the rush of water in the distance
as it takes its leap into the air and falls. In the winter
city she is walking toward you or away from you,
the fog condensing and dripping from the parapets
of old apartments and from the memory of intimate garments
that dried on the balcony in summer, even in the spring.
Do you understand? You can brew your one cup of tea
and you can drink it, the leaves were grown in Ceylon,
the plump young man who packed them was impatient,
he is waiting for news of a scholarship to Utrecht,
he is pretty sure he will rot in this lousy place
if he doesn’t get it, and you can savor the last sip,
