by Robert Hass
was crabs, or mussels, clams. otherwise
the restaurants could just put fish up on their signs,
and when he woke—he’d slept for hours, curled up
on the girder like a child—the sun was going down
and he felt a little better, and afraid. He put on the jacket
he’d used for a pillow, climbed over the railing
carefully, and drove home to an empty house.
There was a pair of her lemon yellow panties
hanging on a doorknob. He studied them. Much-washed.
A faint russet in the crotch that made him sick
with rage and grief. He knew more or less
where she was. A flat somewhere on Russian Hill.
They’d have just finished making love. She ’d have tears
in her eyes and touch his jawbone gratefully. “God,”
she ’d say, “you are so good for me.” Winking lights,
a foggy view downhill toward the harbor and the bay.
“You’re sad,” he ’d say. “Yes.” “Thinking about Nick?”
“Yes,” she ’d say and cry. “I tried so hard,” sobbing now,
“I really tried so hard.” And then he ’d hold her for a while—
Guatemalan weavings from his fieldwork on the wall—
and they’d fuck again, and she would cry some more,
and go to sleep.
And he, he would play that scene
once only, once and a half, and tell himself
that he was going to carry it for a very long time
and that there was nothing he could do
but carry it. He went out onto the porch, and listened
to the forest in the summer dark, madrone bark
cracking and curling as the cold came up.
It’s not the story though, not the friend
leaning toward you, saying “And then I realized—,”
which is the part of stories one never quite believes.
I had the idea that the world’s so full of pain
it must sometimes make a kind of singing.
And that the sequence helps, as much as order helps—
First an ego, and then pain, and then the singing.
FORTY SOMETHING
She says to him, musing, “If you ever leave me,
and marry a younger woman and have another baby,
I’ll put a knife in your heart.” They are in bed,
so she climbs onto his chest, and looks directly
down into his eyes. “You understand? Your heart.”
SHAME: AN ARIA
You think you’ve grown up in various ways
and then the elevator door opens and you’re standing inside
reaming out your nose—something about the dry air
in the mountains—and find yourself facing two spruce elderly couples
dressed like improbable wildflowers in their primary color,
definitely on vacation sports outfits, a wormy curl of one of the body’s
shameful and congealed lubricants gleaming on your fingertip
under the fluorescent lights, and there really isn’t too much to say
as you descend the remaining two flights with them in silence,
all five of you staring straight ahead in the commodious
aluminium group coffin toward the ground floor. You are,
of course, trying to think of something witty to say. Your hand
is, of course, in your pocket discreetly transferring the offending article
into its accumulation of lint. One man clears his throat
and you admit to yourself that there are kinds of people—if not
people in particular—you hate, that these are they,
and that your mind is nevertheless, is nevertheless working
like a demented cicada drying its wings after rain to find some way
to save yourself in your craven, small child’s large ego’s idea
of their eyes. You even crank it up a notch, getting more high-minded
and lugubrious in the seconds it takes for the almost silent
gears and oiled hydraulic or pneumatic plungers and cables
of the machine to set you down. “Nose picking,” you imagine explaining
to the upturned, reverential faces, “is in a way the ground floor
of being. The body’s fluids and solids, its various despised disjecta,
toenail pairings left absently on the bedside table that your lover
the next night notices there, skid marks in underwear or little, faint,
odorous pee-blossoms of the palest polleny color; the stiffened
small droplets in the sheets of the body’s shuddering late-night loneliness
and self-love, russets of menstrual blood, toejam, earwax,
phlegm, the little dead militias of white corpuscles
we call pus, what are they after all but the twins of the juices
of mortal glory: sap, wine, breast milk, sperm, and blood. The most intimate hygienes,
those deepest tribal rules that teach a child
trying to struggle up out of the fear of loss of love
from anger, hatred, fear, they get taught to us, don’t they,
as boundaries, terrible thresholds, what can be said (or thought, or done)
inside the house but not out, what can be said (or thought, or done)
only by oneself, which must therefore best not be done at all,
so that the core of the self, we learn early is where shame lives
and where we also learn doubleness, and a certain practical cunning,
and what a theater is, and the ability to lie—”
the elevator has opened and closed, the silver-haired columbines
of the mountain are murmuring over breakfast menus in a room full of bright plastics
somewhere, and you, grown up in various ways, are at the typewriter,
thinking of all the slimes and jellies of decay, thinking
that the zombie passages, ghoul corridors, radiant death’s-head
entries to that realm of terror claim us in the sick, middle-of-the-night
sessions of self-hatred and remorse, in the day’s most hidden,
watchful self, the man not farting in line at the bank,
no trace of discomfort on his mild, neighbor-loving face, the woman
calculating the distance to the next person she can borrow a tampon from
while she smiles attentively into this new man’s explanation
of his theory about deforestation, claims us also, by seepage, in our lies,
small malices, razor nicks on the skin of others of our meannesses,
deprivations, rage, and what to do but face that way
and praise the kingdom of the dead, praise the power which we have all kinds
of phrases to elide, that none of us can worm our way out of—
“which all must kneel to in the end,” “that no man can evade—”
praise it by calling it time, say it is master of the seasons,
mistress of the moment of the hunting hawk’s sudden sheen of grape-brown
gleaming in the morning sun, the characteristic slow gesture,
two fingers across the cheekbone deliberately, of the lover dreamily
oiling her skin, in this moment, no other, before she turns to you
the face she wants you to see and the re
st
that she hopes, when she can’t keep it hidden, you can somehow love
and which, if you could love yourself, you would.
REGALIA FOR A BLACK HAT DANCER
In the morning, after running along the river:
“Creekstones practice the mild yoga of becoming smooth.”
By afternoon I was thinking: once you’re smooth, you’re dead.
“It is good sometimes that poetry should disenchant us,”
I wrote, and something about the “the heart’s huge vacancy,”
which seemed contemptible. After dinner—sudden cooling
of the summer air—I sat down to it. Where.
Walking down to Heart’s Desire beach in the summer evenings
of the year my marriage ended—
though I was hollowed out by pain,
honeycombed with the emptiness of it,
like the bird bones on the beach
the salt of the bay water had worked on for a season—
such surprising lightness in the hand—
I don’t think I could have told the pain of loss
from the pain of possibility,
though I knew they weren’t the same thing.
When I think of that time, I think mainly of the osprey’s cry,
a startled yelp,
the cry more a color than a sound, and as if
it ripped the sky, was white,
as if it were scar tissue and fresh hurt at once.
Toyon, old oak, and coffeeberry: always about halfway,
but especially if the day had been hot, the scent of vanilla grass—
my throat so swollen with some unsortable mix
of sorrow and desire I couldn’t swallow—
salt smell, gray water, sometimes the fog came in,
pouring down the dragonback of pines,
often there was one blue heron in the tidal pond—
and I’d present my emptiness, which was huge, baffled
(Rilke writing in French because there was no German equivalent
for l’absence in “the great positive sense”
with which it appeared in Valéry:
one of my minor occupations was raging against Rilke),
and most of the time I felt nothing,
when the moment came that was supposed to embody presence,
nothing really. There were a few buffleheads,
as usual, a few gulls rocking in the surf.
Sometimes a Western grebe diving and swimming
with its crazed red eye.
So there were these two emptinesses: one made of pain and desire
and one made of vacancy.
(Paused for a moment in this writing and went out.
Dark, first the dark. Wind in the trees.
Everybody’s private pain: in Korea once, in a mountain pass,
a carved placatory shrine, a figure of a couple copulating,
and underneath in hangul: we beget joy, we beget suffering.
It made you want to say a prayer, to conjure prayer.
Lost everything: this is the night; it doesn’t love me
or not. Shadow of a hawk, then shadow of a hawk.
Going down at about the speed of a second hand.)
I thought of my mother ending her days in a hotel room,
scarcely able to breathe. “I’m doing fine
except for the asthma.” “It’s emphysema, Mom.”
“We used to call it asthma. Anyway, I’m just lucky
I have my health.” Of my brother in the psych ward
at San Francisco General, his ward mate an eight-months-pregnant
girl, coming down, like him, from crack.
When they were let out to smoke in a courtyard,
some guy from another ward four stories up
was pounding on the window. She thought he was trying
to get her attention. A shy, pleased smile (gap in her bad front teeth).
And said to me, coyly, “Fatal attraction.”
When he got the window open, it turned out
he wanted the orderly, also smoking. He needed insulin.
My brother on crack, spoken with a stutter: “The really crazy jones
lasts about two hours and when you come down,
you really (r-r-r-really) come down. You got nothing left
but the lint in your pockets.”
Emptinesses—
one is desire, another is the object that it doesn’t have.
Everything real nourished in the space between these things.
There ought to be some single word for the misery of divorce.
(What is the rhythm of that line? Oh, I see. Four and three,
Emily’s line!—
There ought to be some single word
For the misery of divorce.
It dines upon you casually
duh-dduh-duh-dduh-fierce/remorse/pierce)
In Berkeley over dinner in a restaurant on a Friday night,
I noticed that it was full of fathers with daughters,
mothers with sons. Some of them people I knew or recognized.
The manager of the bookstore, the woman who sold antiques.
These were the stunned, out-of-the-house, noncooking parents
in their new apartments who had the children weekends,
while their mates, resuming the unaccustomed ritual of dating,
were out with the new lover. Children, I guess, make of this
what they have to. I looked around. Kids staring at their plates,
parents studying them anxiously, saying, “So, how was school?”
The whole theater of the real: sadness, which seems infinite,
cruelty, which seems infinite, the cheerful one-armed guy
in the bakery mornings—he puts his croissant between his teeth
and pours himself some coffee; someone on the phone
trying to get me to pay my brother’s rent, “I got too big a heart,
I try to run a clean place”—the first floor reserved
for transvestite hookers wobbling on spiked heels—
and who would deny their clients the secret exhaustion
of their dreams?; the whole botched world—that funny phrase
I’d heard yesterday, someone talking about a failing baseball team:
“they really screw the pooch.” And the pelicans
that settled in the cove in the late midsummer dusk,
preposterous creatures, they seem companionable,
finding each other as the dark came on. I would go home,
make tea, call my children, some piece of writing
that I’d started would seem possible.
Odd how families
live in houses. At first a lot marked out with string.
Then levels, rooms, that lift it off the ground,
arrange it, and then inside that intricate dance
of need and habit and routine. Children’s crayon drawings
on the wall. Messages on the refrigerator. Or altars
for the household gods. At night the dreaming bodies,
little gene pool echoes passing back and forth among them,
earlobe, the lap of an eyelid, and the dreams.
Under sorrow, what? I’d think. Under
the animal sense of loss?
&
nbsp; Climbing in Korea,
months later, coming to the cave of the Sokkaram Buddha—
a view down a forested ravine to the Sea of Japan—
perhaps a glimpse: the closed eyelids—you’d have to make a gesture
with your hand to get the fineness of the gesture in the stone—
the stone hands resting on the thighs, open, utterly composed.
Cool inside. Dark. The stone, though there was no lighting,
seemed to glow. It seemed I could leave every internal fury there
and walk away. In the calm I felt like a wind-up monkey.
Like I had always been a wind-up monkey, and that,
if I knew the gesture (going outside? picking the petals
of the wildflowers—there was something like a thimbleberry bush—
everything was “like” something I knew—on the path
from the monastery—so I seemed to be walking
in a parallel universe, peopled
by unfamiliar birdsong,
and ancient trail dust, and the forest’s dappled light—
papery flowers, very plain ancestor of the garden rose—
another elaboration of desire—of a startling magenta-blue;
I thought I might pick them, bring them in,
and drop before the—what—the Buddha—
the carved, massive stone, the—)
Also thought I could leave my wedding ring. And didn’t do it.
In the months we were apart, I had endless fantasies
about when I’d finally take it off and how. And then one day,
I was moving, lugging cardboard boxes, I looked down
and it wasn’t there. I looked in the grass of the driveway strip.
Sow bugs, an earwig. So strange. This was a time when,
in the universities, everyone was reading Derrida.
Who’d set out to write a dissertation about time;
he read Heidegger, Husserl, Kant, Augustine, and found
that there was no place to stand from which to talk about it.
