by Robert Hass
Mounded snow faintly gray and sculpted into what seems
the entire vocabulary of resignation. It shines
in the one patch of sun, is lustered with the precipitate
of the exhaust of turbine engines, the burnt carbons
of Precambrian forests, life feeding life
feeding life in the usual, mindless way. The colonizer’s
usual prefab, low-roofed storage sheds in the distance
pale beige and curiously hopeful in their upright verticals
like boys in an army, or like the spruce and hemlock forest
on low hillsides beyond them. And beyond those, half-seen
in the haze, range after range of snowy mountains
in the valleys of which—moose feeding along the frozen streams,
snow foxes hunting ptarmigan in the brilliant whiteness—
no human could survive for very long, and which it is the imagination’s
intensest, least possible longing to inhabit.
This is a day of diplomatic lull. Iraq seems to have agreed
to withdraw from Kuwait with Russian assurances
that the government of Hussein will be protected. It won’t happen,
thousands of young men will be killed, shot, blown up,
buried in the sand, an ancient city bombed,
but one speaks this way of countries, as if they were entities
with wills. Iraq has agreed. Russia has promised. A bleak thing,
dry snow melting on the grizzled, salted tarmac.
one of the men on the airstrip is waving his black,
monstrously gloved hands at someone. Almost dancing:
strong body, rhythmic, efficient stride. He knows
what he ’s supposed to do. He ’s getting our clothes to us
at the next stop. Flower burst ties, silky underwear.
There are three young Indians, thin faces, high cheekbones,
skin the color of old brass, chatting quietly across from me
in what must be an Athabascan dialect. A small child crying
mildly, sleepily, down the way, a mother murmuring in English.
Soft hums of motors stirring through the plane ’s low, dim fuselage
the stale air, breathed and breathed, we have been sharing.
NOTES ON “LAYOVER”
I could have said that I am a listless eye gazing through watery glass on a Friday afternoon in February. A raven flies by. If he cries out sharply, I can’t hear him. Strong wingbeats. Very black against gray sky, white snow.
I could have said that Alaska—where the sea breaks its back, in one of the languages of the people who looked for centuries at water lashing and lashing against jagged rock, mists of spray blown toward them by Aleutian winds—still feels like a military colony, which is the way a wilderness is settled, and is, ultimately, why I happen to be here.
And that the woman with the baby is the wife of some technician whose rank she knows well from filling out forms to do with the delivery of her child and an ovarian cyst she had removed and discount airfares for the relatives of ALASCOM personnel, and also because it is a form of hope, grade seven, soon to be grade six.
And that, watching the men unload the luggage, I was thinking of her body, and then of her underwear. Pretty, not very expensive, neatly folded for the journey.
A way of locating itself that even the idle mind works at. Airports: people dressed well and not well, hope and exhaustion, reunions, separations. Families with banners and flowers, WELCOME HOME SUSIE, and the beaming unsexual smiles of family loyalty, and floral sprays in cellophane. Men with clean shirts in rayon bags smoking in the limbo between sales presentations—“I just admit flat out” overheard on the flight in “that we’ve had a little problem with distribution and that the home office knows it has to get its act together, so we’re pricing real competitively, and if they place an order right now” words that can stare down any hopelessness “they got a good chance of getting theirselves a hell of a deal.” Nursing slim glasses of beer in the lounges—each sip stranding a little line of foam—to the sound of daytime talk shows on men who sleep with their mothers-in-law, transvestites, filmed three thousand miles away, transmitted to the heavens and bounced back in little waves and dots and flurries of ionized air carrying the peculiar contents of human curiosity. The sweet bleating of the baby, part whimper, part croon now, to take its place in this vast, deeply strange net of contingencies. An old poem by an old poet composed on islands to the southwest of here; he must have been on a fishing boat: The whitebait / opens its black eye / in the net of the law.
I could have said a translation of the Athabascan idiom for “good-bye” is “make prayers to the raven.” Anyone who has walked in a northern forest knows what sense it makes. Sharp echoing cry in the pinewood and the snow. Swift black flash of its flight, and the powerful wings. Ruthless and playful spirit of creation. World’s truth in the black bead of its eye.
That all crossings over are a way of knowing, and of knowing we don’t know, where we have been: a man leaves one woman for another and wakes up in a room with morning light and a vase he doesn’t recognize, full of hydrangeas, mauve petals of hydrangeas.
THE WOODS IN NEW JERSEY
Where there was only gray, and brownish gray,
And grayish brown against the white
of fallen snow at twilight in the winter woods,
Now an uncanny flamelike thing, black
and sulphur-yellow, as if it were dreamed by Audubon,
Is turned upside down in a delicate cascade
of new green leaves, feeding on whatever mites
or small white spiders haunt underleafs at stem end.
A magnolia warbler, to give the thing a name.
The other name we give this overmuch of appetite
And beauty unconscious of itself is life.
And that that kept the mind becalmed all winter?—
The more austere and abstract rhythm of the trunks,
vertical music the cold makes visible,
That holds the whole thing up and gives it form,
or strength—call that the law. It’s made,
whatever we like to think, more of interests
than of reasons, trees reaching each their own way
for the light, to make the sort of order that there is.
And what of those deer threading through the woods
In a late snowfall and silent as the snow?
Look: they move among the winter trees, so much
the color of the trees, they hardly seem to move.
for Justice William J. Brennan, Jr.
IOWA CITY: EARLY APRIL
This morning a cat—bright orange—pawing at the one patch of new
grass in the sand- and tanbark-colored leaves.
And last night the sapphire of the raccoon’s eyes in the beam of the
flashlight.
He was climbing a tree beside the house, trying to get onto the porch, I
think, for a wad of oatmeal
Simmered in cider from the bottom of the pan we’d left out for the birds.
And earlier a burnished, somewhat dazed woodchuck, his coat
gleaming with spring,
Loping toward his burrow in the roots of a tree among the drying
winter’s litter
of old leaves on the floor of the woods, when I went out to get the
New York Times.
And male cardinals whistling back an
d forth—sireeep, sreeep, sreeep—
Sets of three sweet full notes, weaving into and out of each other like
the triplet rhymes in medieval poetry,
And the higher, purer notes of the tufted titmice among them,
High in the trees where they were catching what they could of the early sun.
And a doe and two yearlings, picking their way along the worrying path
they’d made through the gully, their coats the color of the forest floor,
Stopped just at the roots of the great chestnut where the woodchuck’s
burrow was,
Froze, and the doe looked back over her shoulder at me for a long
moment and leaped forward,
Her young following, and bounded with that almost mincing precision
in the landing of each hoof
Up the gully, over it, and out of sight. So that I remembered
Dreaming last night that a deer walked into the house while I was
writing at the kitchen table,
Came in the glass door from the garden, looked at me with a stilled
defiant terror, like a thing with no choices,
And, neck bobbing in that fragile-seeming, almost mechanical mix of
arrest and liquid motion, came to the table
And snatched a slice of apple, and stood, and then quietened, and to my
surprise did not leave again.
And those little captains, the chickadees, swift to the feeder and swift away.
And the squirrels with their smoke-plume tails trailing digging in the
leaves to bury or find buried—
I’m told they don’t remember where they put things, that it’s an activity
of incessant discovery—
Nuts, tree-fall proteins, whatever they forage from around the house of
our leavings,
And the flame-headed woodpecker at the suet with his black-and-white
ladderback elegant fierceness—
They take sunflower seeds and stash them in the rough ridges of the
tree ’s bark
Where the beaks of the smoke-and-steel blue nuthatches can’t quite get
at them—
Though the nuthatches sometimes seem to get them as they con the
trees methodically for spider’s eggs or some other overwintering
insect’s intricately packaged lump of futurity
Got from its body before the cold came on.
And the little bat in the kitchen lightwell—
When I climbed on a chair to remove the sheet of wimpled plastic and
let it loose,
It flew straight into my face and I toppled to the floor, chair under me,
And it flared down the hall and did what seemed a frantic reconnoiter
of the windowed, high-walled living room.
And lit on a brass firelog where it looked like a brown and ash gray
teenaged suede glove with Mephistophelean dreams,
And then, spurt of black sperm, up, out the window, and into the
twilight woods.
All this life going on about my life, or living a life about all this life
going on,
Being a creature, whatever my drama of the moment at the edge of the
raccoon’s world—
He froze in my flashlight beam and looked down, no affect, just looked,
The ringtailed curled and flared to make him look bigger and not to be
messed with—
I was thinking he couldn’t know how charming his comic-book
robber’s mask was to me,
That his experience of his being and mine of his and his of mine were
things entirely apart,
Though there were between us, probably, energies of shrewd and
respectful tact, based on curiosity and fear—
I knew about his talons whatever he knew about me—
And as for my experience of myself, it comes and goes, I’m not sure it’s
any one thing, as my experience of these creatures is not,
And I know I am often too far from it or too near, glad to be rid of it
which is why it was such a happiness,
The bright orange of the cat, and the first pool of green grass-leaves
in early April, and the birdsong—that orange and that green not
colors you’d set next to one another in the human scheme.
And the crows’ calls, even before you open your eyes, at sunup.
A NOTE ON “IOWA CITY: EARLY APRIL”
The raccoon stared down from the crotch of a tree.
A dark night, icy in the early spring.
“This naturalist I admire,” I said, “says that every species lives in its
own sensory world.”
The raccoon stared down; he was silent.
“He also said that we may come to know enough about the human
brain to diagnose and correct for the deformations
imposed by evolution on the human senses and arrive at something like
objective truth.”
The raccoon was silent.
“Maybe,” I volunteered, “they can do something about raccoon
deformation.”
He might have been thinking “deformed from what?” but I don’t think
so; he was silent.
He might have been trying to discern under the odor of garlic and
rosemary on my fingers,
and under the smell of oatmeal soap under that, the smell of sex from a
sweet hour when we lay down and the snow fell in quick flurries
in the early afternoon; he may have been smelling toward some distant
cousin to the smell that is pistil and stamen
from which flowers the raccoon-universe.
Maybe that, but I don’t know. The raccoon was silent.
He might have been studying an enemy,
he might simply have been curious
but I don’t know.
So I entered the silence, and was glad to be in it for a while, knowing I
couldn’t stay.
It smelled like snow and pine and the winter dark, though it was my
silence, not his, and there was nothing there.
for E. O. Wilson
SONNET
A man talking to his ex-wife on the phone.
He has loved her voice and listens with attention
to every modulation of its tone. Knowing
it intimately. Not knowing what he wants
from the sound of it, from the tendered civility.
He studies, out of the window, the seed shapes
of the broken pods of ornamental trees.
The kind that grow in everyone’s garden, that no one
but horticulturists can name. Four arched chambers
of pale green, tiny vegetal proscenium arches,
a pair of black tapering seeds bedded in each chamber.
A wish geometry, miniature, Indian or Persian,
lovers or gods in their apartments. outside, white,
patient animals, and tangled vines, and rain.
FAINT MUSIC
Maybe you need to write a poem about grace.
When everything broken is broken,
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br /> and everything dead is dead,
and the hero has looked into the mirror with complete contempt,
and the heroine has studied her face and its defects
remorselessly, and the pain they thought might,
as a token of their earnestness, release them from themselves
has lost its novelty and not released them,
and they have begun to think, kindly and distantly,
watching the others go about their days—
likes and dislikes, reasons, habits, fears—
that self-love is the one weedy stalk
of every human blossoming, and understood,
therefore, why they had been, all their lives,
in such a fury to defend it, and that no one—
except some almost inconceivable saint in his pool
of poverty and silence—can escape this violent, automatic
life ’s companion ever, maybe then, ordinary light,
faint music under things, a hovering like grace appears.
As in the story a friend told once about the time
he tried to kill himself. His girl had left him.
Bees in the heart, then scorpions, maggots, and then ash.
He climbed onto the jumping girder of the bridge,
the bay side, a blue, lucid afternoon.
And in the salt air he thought about the word seafood,
that there was something faintly ridiculous about it.
No one said landfood. He thought it was degrading to the rainbow perch
he’d reeled in gleaming from the cliffs, the black rock bass,
scales like polished carbon, in beds of kelp
along the coast—and he realized that the reason for the word
