by Robert Hass
There was no ground. It was language. The scandal
of nothingness! Put cheerfully to work by my colleagues
to dismantle regnant ideologies. It was a time when,
a few miles away, kids were starting to kill each other
in wars over turf for selling drugs, schizophrenics
with matted hair, dazed eyes, festering feet, always engaged
in some furious volleying inner dialogue they neglected,
unlike the rest of us, to hide, were beginning to fill the streets,
“de-institutionalized,” in someone ’s idea of reform,
and I was searching in the rosebed of a rented house
inch by inch, looking under the car seat where the paper clips
and Roosevelt dimes and unresolved scum-shapes of once
vegetal stuff accumulate in abject little villages
where matter hides while it transforms itself. Nothing there.
I never found it.
Looking at old frescoes
from the medieval churches in The Cloisters once, I wondered if,
all over Europe, there were not corresponding vacancies,
sheer blanks where pietàs and martyrdoms of Santa Lucia
and crowing cocks rising to announce the dawn in which
St. Peter had betrayed his lord in sandstone and basalt
and carnelian marble once had been. This emptiness
felt like that. Under the hosannahs and the terror of the plague
and the crowning of the Virgin in the spring.
I didn’t leave my ring. Apparently I was supposed to wait
until it disappeared. I didn’t know what else, exactly,
I could leave.
In Seoul, in Myongdong, in a teeming alley,
there was a restaurant where the fish was so fresh
they let you know it by beginning each meal
with a small serving of the tips of the tentacles
of octopus, just cut, writhing on a plate.
In the latticed entrance, perch glowing like pearls
in the lamplight thrown from doorways
as they circulate, wide-eyed and moony, in the tanks,
coppery lobsters scuttling over lobsters,
squid like the looseness in a dream. Had been at a meeting
all day on the conditions of imprisoned writers.
This one without paper and pen for several years.
This one with blood in his urine.
In small cells
all over the world, I found myself thinking,
walking through the marketplace—apple-pears
and nectarines in great piles, wavery under swinging lamps,
as if you could sell the sunrise—torturers upholding
the order of the state. Under screams order, and under that—
it must be the torturer’s nightmare—nothing.
Smoothness
of the stone at Sokkaram. The way the contours, flowing,
were weightless and massive at once. I said to myself
there was kindness in the Buddha’s hands, but there wasn’t kindness
in the hands. They made the idea of kindness
seem—not a delusion exactly, or a joke. They smoothed
the idea away the way you’d stroke a nervous or a frightened dog.
(Outside again. Rubbing my eyes. Deep night, brilliant stars.
I never thought I’d write about this subject. Was tired of “subjects.”
Mallarmé on music: the great thing is that it can resolve an argument
without ever stating the terms. But thought I’d ride this rhythm out,
this somewhat tired, subdued voice—like Landor’s “Carlino,” perhaps—
a poet-guide!—and see where it was going.)
Around that time—
find the neutral distance in which to say this—
a woman came into my life. What I felt was delight.
When she came into the room, I smiled. The gift was
that there didn’t need to be passionate yearning across distances.
One night—before or after Sokkaram?—when we had made love
and made love, desperate kissings, wells of laughter,
in a monkish apartment on the wooden floor, we went outside,
naked in the middle of the night. There must have been a full moon.
There was a thick old shadowy deodar cedar by my door
and the cones were glowing, lustrously glowing,
and we thought, both of us, our happiness had lit the tree up.
The word that occurs to me is droll. It seemed sublimely droll.
The way we were as free as children playing hide-and-seek.
Her talk—raffish, funny, unexpected, sometimes wise, darkened—
the way a black thing is scintillant in light—by irony.
The way neither of us needed to hold back, think
before we spoke, lie, tiptoe carefully around a given subject,
or brace ourselves to say hard truths. It felt to me hilarious,
and hilarity, springwater gushing up from some muse’s font
of crystal in old poems, seemed a form of emptiness. Look!
(Rilke in the sonnets) I last but a minute. I walk on nothing.
Coming and going I do this dance in air. At night
when we had got too tired to talk, were touching all along our bodies,
nodding off, I’d fall asleep smiling. Mornings—for how long—
I’d wake in pain. Physical pain, fluid; it moved
through my body like a grassfire spreading on a hill.
(Opposite of touching.) I’d think of my wife, her lover,
some moment in our children’s lives, the gleam of old wood
on a Welsh cabinet we’d agonized over buying,
put against one wall, then another till it founds its place.
This—old word!—riding that we made, its customs, villages, demesnes,
would torture me awhile. If she were there, rare mornings
that she was—we did a lot of car keys, hurried dressing, last kisses
on swollen lips at 2 am—I’d turn to her, stare at her sleeping face
and want to laugh from happiness. I’d even think: ten years
from now we could be screaming at each other in a kitchen,
and want to laugh. My legs and chest still felt as if
someone had been beating them with sticks. I could hardly move.
I’d quote Vallejo to myself: “Golpes como del odio de Dios”;
I’d stare at the ceiling, bewildered, and feel a grief
so old it could have been some beggar woman in a fairy tale.
I didn’t know you could lie down in such swift, opposing currents.
Also, two emptinesses, I suppose, the one
joy comes from, the one regret, disfigured intention, the longing
to be safe or whole flows into when it’s disappearing.
I’d gone out of the cave. Looked at the scaled brightness
of the sea ten miles away; looked at unfamiliar plants.
During the war, a botanist in Pusan had told me,
a number of native species had become extinct. People
in the countryside boiled anything that grew to make a soup.
We had “spring hunger,” he said, like medieval peasants.
There’s even a word for it in anci
ent Korean. Back inside,
in the cool darkness carved with boddhisattvas,
I presented myself once more for some revelation.
Nothing. Great calm, flowing stone. No sorrow, no not-sorrow.
Lotuses, carved in the pediment, simple, fleshy, open.
Private pain is easy, in a way. It doesn’t go away,
but you can teach yourself to see its size. Invent a ritual.
Walk up a mountain in the afternoon, gather up pine twigs.
Light a fire, thin smoke, not an ambitious fire,
and sit before it and watch it till it burns to ash
and the last gleam is gone from it, and dark falls.
Then you get up, brush yourself off, and walk back to the world.
If you’re lucky, you’re hungry.
In the town center
of Kwangju, there was a late October market fair.
Some guy was barbecuing halfs of baby chicks on a long, sooty contraption
of a grill, slathering them with soy sauce. Baby chicks.
Corn pancakes stuffed with leeks and garlic. Some milky,
violent, sweet Korean barley wine or beer. Families strolling.
Booths hawking calculators, sox, dolls to ward off evil,
and computer games. Everywhere, of course, it was Korea,
people arguing politics, red-faced, women serving men.
I thought in this flesh-and-charcoal-scented heavy air
of the Buddha in his cave. Tired as if from making love
or writing through the night. Was I going to eat a baby chick?
Two pancakes. A clay mug of the beer. Sat down
under an umbrella and looked to see, among the diners
feasting, quarreling about their riven country,
if you were supposed to eat the bones. You were. I did.
JATUN SACHA
First she was singing. Then it was a gold thing, her singing.
And her bending. She was singing and a gold thing.
A selving. It was a ringing before there was a bell.
Before there was a bell there was a bell. Notwithstanding.
Standing or sitting, sometimes at night or in the day,
when they worked, they hummed. And made their voices high
and made sounds. It was the ringing they hadn’t heard yet
singing, though they heard it, ringing.
When Casamiro’s daughter went to the river and picked arum leaves,
and wet them, and rubbed them together,
they made the one sweet note that was the ringing.
It was the one-note cry of a bee-eating bird
with a pale blue crest, and when the first one
made the ringing with the arum leaves, and the others
heard that the arum leaves were the bee-eating bird,
they laughed. Their laughter rang.
And the young guy who worked metal—they liked it best at night,
when the iron glowed and the sparks showered down
and he struck metal against metal in the glowing.
He fashioned what he fashioned for adornment
or for praying or for killing. And he knew the made things
from the ringing. Which was the arum leaves and the sounds
made in love and the bee-eating bird and the humming.
She sang like that, something of keening and something of laughing,
birth cries, and a gold thing, ringing.
FRIDA KAHLO: IN THE SALIVA
In the saliva
In the paper
in the eclipse
In all the lines
in all the colors
in all the clay jars
in my breast
outside inside—
in the inkwell—in the difficulties of writing
in the wonder of my eyes—in the ultimate
limits of the sun (the sun has no limits) in
everything. To speak it all is imbecile, magnificent
DIEGO in my urine—DIEGO in my mouth—in my
heart. In my madness. In my dream—in
the blotter—in the point of my pen—
in the pencils—in the landscapes—in the
food—in the metal—in imagination
in the sicknesses—in the glass cupboards—
in his lapels—in his eyes—DIEGO—
in his mouth—DIEGO—in his lies.
Transcribed and translated from a manuscript in her hand, at Diego
Rivera’s studio near the Hacienda San Angel in Mexico City
ENGLISH: AN ODE
1.
¿De quien son las piedras del rio
que ven tus ojos, habitante?
Tiene un espejo la mañana.
2.
Jodhpurs: from a state in northeast India,
for the riding breeches of the polo-playing English.
Dhoti: once the dress of the despised,
it is practically a symbol of folk India.
One thinks of blood flowering in Gandhi’s
after the zealot shot him.
Were one, therefore, to come across a child’s primer
a rainy late winter afternoon in a used bookshop
in Hyde Park and notice, in fine script,
fading, on the title page,
“Susanna Mansergh, The Lodge, Little Shelford, Cmbs.”
and underneath it, a fairly recent ballpoint
in an adult hand: Anna Sepulveda Garcia—sua libra
and flip through pages which asseverate,
in captions enhanced by lively illustrations,
that Jane wears jodhpurs, while Derek wears a dhoti,
it wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume a political implication,
lost, perhaps, on the children of Salvadoran refugees
studying English in a housing project in Chicago.
3.
Ode: not connected, historically, to odor or to odd.
To mad, though obsolete, meant “to behave insanely”
and is quite another thing than to madden,
meaning, of course, “to irritate.”
So that the melancholy Oxford cleric who wished to live
“Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife”
and gave Thomas Hardy the title for that novel
was merely observing that people in large numbers
living at close quarters act crazy
and are best given a wide berth.
Not an option, perhaps,
for a former high school math teacher
from San Salvador whose sister, a secretary in the diocesan office
of the Christian Labor Movement, was found
in an alley with her neck broken, and who therefore
followed her elder brother to Chicago and, perhaps,
bought a child’s alphabet book in a used bookstore
near the lake where it had languished for thirty years
since the wife, perhaps, of an Irish professor of Commonwealth History
at the university had sold it in 1959—maybe the child died
of some childhood cancer—maybe she outgrew the primer
and when her bookshelf began to fill with more grown-up books,
The Wind in the Willows, Winnie-the-Pooh—
what privilege those titles suddenly call up!—
her father, famous for his groundbreaking Cold War and Commonwealth
of 1948, looking antique now on the miscellaneous shelf
beside row on row of James T. Farrell, sold it. Or perhaps his wife
did and found it painful to let her daughter’s childhood go,
was depressed after. Probably she hated Chicago anyway.
And, browsing, embittered, among the volumes on American history
she somehow felt she should be reading,
thought Wisconsin, Chicago: they killed them
and took their language and then they used it
to name the places that they’ve taken.
Perhaps the marriage survived. Back in London
she may have started graduate school in German Lit.
“Be ahead of all partings,” Rilke said in the Spender translation.
Perhaps she was one of those lives—if the child did die
of the sickness I chose to imagine—in which death
inscribes a permanent before and after. Perhaps
she was one of those whose story is innocence
and a private wound and aftermath.
4.
-Math, as it turned out,
when she looked up the etymology
comes from an Anglo-Saxon word for mowing.
Maeth. It would have been the era
of “hot skirts” and The Rolling Stones.
And she a little old to enjoy it. Standing on Chelsea Embankment
after the Duncan Grant retrospective at the Tate,
thinking about the use of du in the Duino Elegies
or about the photo in the Times that morning
of the Buddhist monk in Saigon, wearing something
like a dhoti, immobile, sheathed in flames.
5.
There are those who think it’s in fairly bad taste
to make habitual reference to social and political problems
in poems. To these people it seems a form of melodrama
