by Robert Hass
or self-aggrandizement, which it no doubt partly is.
And there’s no doubt either that these same people also tend
to feel that it ruins a perfectly good party
to be constantly making reference to the poor or oppressed
and their misfortunes in poems which don’t,
after all, lift a finger to help them. Please
help yourself to the curried chicken.
What is the etymology of curry? Of chicken?
Wouldn’t you like just another splash of chardonnay?
There’s far less objection, generally speaking,
you will find yourself less at loggerheads
with the critics, by making mention of accidental death,
which might happen to any of us, which does not,
therefore, seem like moral nagging, and which is also,
in our way of seeing things, possibly tragic
and possibly absurd—“Helen Mansergh was thinking about Rilke’s
pronouns
which may be why she never saw the taxi”—and thus
a subject much easier to ironize.
She—the mother from Salvador—may have bought several books.
Mother Goose, Goodnight Moon. All
relatively cheap. And that night her brother might have come
with a bag of groceries. And—a gesture against sleet and ice—
flowers in January!
And the Salvadoran paper from Miami.
6.
Disaster: something wrong with the stars.
Loggerheads: heavy brass balls attached to long sticks;
they were heated on shipboard and plunged into buckets of tar
to soften it for use. By synecdoche were sailors tars.
And from the rage of living together in brutish conditions
on a ship the tars were often at loggerheads. You could crush
a man’s knees with them easily. One swing. Claim
it was an accident. If the buggers didn’t believe you,
the punishment was some number of lashes with a whip. Not death.
That was the punishment for sodomy, or striking an officer.
7.
“As when the Sun
in dim eclipse disastrous twilight sheds…”
Mount Diablo foothills, green in the early spring.
Creeks running, scent of bay leaves in the air.
And we heard a high two-note whistle: once,
twice, and then again with a high vibrato tailing.
“What’s that?” “Loggerhead shrike.”
(Years later one of the young poets at Iowa, impatient
with her ornithologist boyfriend, his naming
everything to death, her thinking bird, bird!)
8.
Imagine (from the Latin, imago, a likeness)
a language (also from Latin, lingua, the tongue)
purged (purgo, to cleanse) of history (not the Greek hist
for tissue, but the Greek historia,
to learn by inquiry). Not this net of circumstance
(circum, etc.) that we are caught in,
ill-starred, quarried with veins of cruelty,
stupidity, bad luck,
which rhymes with fuck,
not the sweet act, the exclamation
of disgust, or maybe both
a little singing ode-like rhyme
because we live our lives in language and in time,
craving some pure idiomorphic dialect of the thing itself,
Adamic, electrified by clear tension
like the distance between a sparrow and a cat,
self and thing and eros as a god of wonder:
it sat upon a branch and sang: the bird.
9.
In one of Hardy’s poems, a man named “Drummer Hodge,”
born in Lincolnshire where the country word
for twilight was dimpsy two centuries ago,
was a soldier buried in South Africa.
Some war that had nothing to do with him.
Face up according to the custom of his people
so that Hardy could imagine him gazing forever
into foreign constellations. Cyn was the Danish word
for farm. Hence Hodge’s cyn.
And someone of that stock studied medicine.
Hence Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Lymph from the Latin
meant once “a pure clear spring of water.”
Hence limpid. But it came to mean
the white cells of the blood.
“His homely Northern breast and brain
Grow to some Southern tree
And strange-eyed constellations reign
His stars eternally.”
10.
I have been hearing it all morning
As if it were a Spanish nonsense rhyme.
Like the poem of José Martí the woman in Chicago
might have sung to her children as they fell asleep:
Yo soy un hombre sincero
De donde crece la palma,
Y antes de morime quiero
Echar mis versos del alma.
Do you hear it? She has (strong beat) a Hodg (strong beat)
kin’s lym-phom (strong beat)-a.
This impure spring of language, strange-eyed,
“To scatter the verses of the soul.”
11.
So—what are the river stones
that come swimming to your eyes, habitante?
They hold the hope of morning.
THE SEVENTH NIGHT
It was the seventh night and he walked out to look at stars.
Chill in the air, sharp, not of summer, and he wondered
if the geese on the lake felt it and grew restless
and if that was why, in the later afternoon, they had gathered
at the bay’s mouth and flown abruptly back and forth,
back and forth on the easy, swift veering of their wings.
It was high summer and he was thinking of autumn,
under a shadowy tall pine, and of geese overhead on cold mornings
and high clouds drifting. He regarded the stars in the cold dark.
They were a long way off, and he decided, watching them blink,
that compared to the distance between him and them,
the outside-looking-in feeling was dancing cheek-to-cheek.
And noticed then that she was there, a shadow between parked cars,
looking out across the valley where the half-moon poured thin light
down the pine ridge. She started when he approached her,
and then recognized him, and smiled, and said, “Hi, night light.”
And he said, “Hi, dreamer.” And she said, “Hi, moonshine,”
and he said, “Hi, mortal splendor.” And she said, “That’s good.”
She thought for a while. Scent of sage or yerba buena
and the singing in the house. She took a new tack and said,
“My father is a sad chair and I am the blind thumb’s yearning.”
He said, “Who threw the jade swan in the chicken soup?”
Some of the others were coming out of the house, saying good-bye,
hugging each other. She said, “The lion of grief paws
w
hat meat she is given.” Cars starting up, one of the stagehands
struggling to uproot the pine. He said, “Rifling the purse
of possible regrets.” She said, “Staggering tarts, a narcoleptic moon.”
Most of the others were gone. A few gathered to listen.
The stagehands were lugging off the understory plants.
Two others were rolling up the mountain. It was clear that,
though polite, they were impatient. He said, “Good-bye, last thing.”
She said, “So long, apocalypse.” Someone else said, “Time,”
but she said, “The last boat left Xania in late afternoon.”
He said, “Good-bye, Moscow, nights like sable,
mornings like the word persimmon.” She said,
“Day’s mailman drinks from a black well of reheated coffee
in a café called Mom’s on the outskirts of Durango.” He said,
“That’s good.” And one of the stagehands stubbed
his cigarette and said, “OK, would the last of you folks to leave,
if you can remember it, just put out the stars?” which they did,
and the white light everywhere in that silence was white paper.
INTERRUPTED MEDITATION
Little green involute fronds of fern at creekside.
And the sinewy clear water rushing over creekstone
of the palest amber, veined with a darker gold,
thinnest lines of gold rivering through the amber
like—ah, now we come to it. We were not put on earth,
the old man said, he was hacking into the crust
of a sourdough half loaf in his vehement, impatient way
with an old horn-handled knife, to express ourselves.
I knew he had seen whole cities leveled: also
that there had been a time of shame for him, outskirts
of a ruined town, half Baroque, half Greek Revival,
pediments of Flora and Hygeia from a brief eighteenth-century
health spa boom lying on the streets in broken chunks
and dogs scavenging among them. His one act of courage
then had been to drop pieces of bread or chocolate,
as others did, where a fugitive family of Jews
was rumored to be hiding. I never raised my voice,
of course, none of us did. He sliced wedges of cheese
after the bread, spooned out dollops of sour jam
from some Hungarian plum, purple and faintly gingered.
Every day the bits of half-mildewed, dry, hard—
this is my invention—whitened chocolate, dropped furtively
into rubble by the abandoned outbuilding of some suburban
mechanic’s shop—but I am sure he said chocolate—
and it comforted no one. We talked in whispers.
“Someone is taking them.” “Yes,” Janos said,
“But it might just be the dogs.” He set the table.
Shrugged. Janos was a friend from the university,
who fled east to join a people’s liberation army,
died in Siberia somewhere. Some of us whispered “art,”
he said. Some of us “truth.” A debate with cut vocal chords.
You have to understand that, for all we knew, the Germans
would be there forever. And if not the Germans, the Russians.
Well, you don’t “have to” understand anything, naturally.
No one knew which way to jump. What we had was language,
you see. Some said art, some said truth. Truth, of course,
was death. Clattered the plates down on the table. No one,
no one said “self-expression.” Well, you had your own forms
of indulgence. Didn’t people in the forties say “man”
instead of “the self?” I think I said. I thought “the self”
came in in 1949. He laughed. It’s true. Man,
we said, is the creature who is able to watch himself
eat his own shit from fear. You know what that is?
Melodrama. I tell you, there is no bottom to self-pity.
This comes back to me on the mountainside. Butterflies—
tiny blues with their two-dot wings like quotation marks
or an abandoned pencil sketch of a face. They hover lightly
over lupine blooms, whirr of insects in the three o’clock sun.
What about being? I had asked him. Isn’t language responsible
to it, all of it, the texture of bread, the hairstyles
of the girls you knew in high school, shoelaces, sunsets,
the smell of tea? Ah, he said, you’ve been talking to Milosz.
To Czeslaw I say this: silence precedes us. We are catching up.
I think he was quoting Jabès whom he liked to read.
Of course, here, gesturing out the window, pines, ragged green
of a winter lawn, the bay, you can express what you like,
enumerate the vegetation. And you! you have to, I’m afraid,
since you don’t excel at metaphor. A shrewd, quick glance
to see how I have taken this thrust. You write well, clearly.
You are an intelligent man. But—finger in the air—
silence is waiting. Milosz believes there is a Word
at the end that explains. There is silence at the end,
and it doesn’t explain, it doesn’t even ask. He spread chutney
on his bread, meticulously, out to the corners. Something
angry always in his unexpected fits of thoroughness
I liked. Then cheese. Then a lunging, wolfish bite.
Put it this way, I give you, here, now, a magic key.
What does it open? This key I give you, what exactly
does it open? Anything, anything! But what? I found
that what I thought about was the failure of my marriage,
the three or four lost years just at the end and after.
For me there is no key, not even the sum total of our acts.
But you are a poet. You pretend to make poems. And?
She sat on the couch sobbing, her rib cage shaking
from its accumulated abysses of grief and thick sorrow.
I don’t love you, she said. The terrible thing is
that I don’t think I ever loved you. He thought to himself
fast, to numb it, that she didn’t mean it, thought
what he had done to provoke it. It was May.
Also pines, lawn, the bay, a blossoming apricot.
Everyone their own devastation. Each on its own scale.
I don’t know what the key opens. I know we die,
and don’t know what is at the end. We don’t behave well.
And there are monsters out there, and millions of others
to carry out their orders. We live half our lives
in fantasy, and words. This morning I am pretending
to be walking down the mountain in the heat.
A vault of blue sky, traildust, the sweet medicinal
scent of mountain grasses, and at trailside—
I’m a little ashamed that I want to end this poem
singing, but I want to end this poem singing—the wooly
c
losed-down buds of the sunflower to which, in English,
someone gave the name, sometime, of pearly everlasting.
Time and Materials
IOWA, JANUARY
In the long winter nights, a farmer’s dreams are narrow.
Over and over, he enters the furrow.
AFTER TRAKL
October night, the sun going down,
Evening with its brown and blue
(Music from another room),
Evening with its blue and brown.
October night, the sun going down.
ENVY OF OTHER PEOPLE’S POEMS
In one version of the legend the sirens couldn’t sing.
It was only a sailor’s story that they could.
So Odysseus, lashed to the mast, was harrowed
By a music that he didn’t hear—plungings of sea,
Wind-sheer, the off-shore hunger of the birds—
And the mute women gathering kelp for garden mulch,
Seeing him strain against the cordage, seeing
The awful longing in his eyes, are changed forever
On their rocky waste of island by their imagination
Of his imagination of the song they didn’t sing.
A SUPPLE WREATH OF MYRTLE
Poor Nietzsche in Turin, eating sausage his mother
Mails to him from Basel. A rented room,
A small square window framing August clouds
Above the mountain. Brooding on the form
Of things: the dangling spur
Of an Alpine columbine, winter-tortured trunks
Of cedar in the summer sun, the warp in the aspen’s trunk
Where it torqued up through the snowpack.
“Everywhere the wasteland grows; woe
To him whose wasteland is within.”
Dying of syphilis. Trimming a luxuriant mustache.
In love with the opera of Bizet.
FUTURES IN LILACS
