by Robert Hass
“Tender little Buddha,” she said
Of my least Buddha-like member.
She was probably quoting Allen Ginsberg,
Who was probably paraphrasing Walt Whitman.
After the Civil War, after the death of Lincoln,
That was a good time to own railroad stocks,
But Whitman was in the Library of Congress,
Researching alternative Americas,
Reading up on the curiosities of Hindoo philosophy,
Studying the etchings of stone carvings
Of strange couplings in a book.
She was taking off a blouse,
Almost transparent, the color of a silky tangerine.
From Capitol Hill Walt Whitman must have been able to see
Willows gathering the river haze
In the cooling and still-humid twilight.
He was in love with a trolley conductor
In the summer of—what was it?—1867? 1868?
THREE DAWN SONGS IN SUMMER
1.
The first long shadows in the fields
Are like mortal difficulty.
The first birdsong is not like that at all.
2.
The light in summer is very young and wholly unsupervised.
No one has made it sit down to breakfast.
It’s the first one up, the first one out.
3.
Because he has opened his eyes, he must be light
And she, sleeping beside him, must be the visible,
One ringlet of hair curled about her ear.
Into which he whispers, “Wake up!”
“Wake up!” he whispers.
THE DISTRIBUTION OF HAPPINESS
Bedcovers thrown back,
Tangled sheets,
Lustrous in moonlight.
Image of delight,
or longing,
or torment,
Depending on who’s
Doing the imagining.
(I know: you are the one
Pierced through, I’m the one
Bent low beside you, trying
To peer into your eyes.)
ETYMOLOGY
Her body by the fire
Mimicked the light-conferring midnights
of philosophy.
Suppose they are dead now.
Isn’t “dead now” an odd expression?
The sound of the owls outside
And the wind soughing in the trees
Catches in their ears, is sent out
In scouting parties of sensation down their spines.
If you say it became language or it was nothing,
Who touched whom?
In what hurtle of starlight?
Poor language, poor theory
of language. The shards of skull
In the Egyptian museum looked like maps of the wind-eroded
Canyon labyrinths from which,
Standing on the verge
In the yellow of a dwindling fall, you hear
Echo and reecho the cries of terns
Fishing the worked silver of a rapids.
And what to say of her wetness? The Anglo-Saxons
Had a name for it. They called it silm.
They were navigators. It was also
Their word for the look of moonlight on the sea.
THE PROBLEM OF DESCRIBING COLOR
If I said—remembering in summer,
The cardinal’s sudden smudge of red
In the bare gray winter woods—
If I said, red ribbon on the cocked straw hat
of the girl with pooched-out lips
Dangling a wiry lapdog
In the painting by Renoir—
If I said fire, if I said blood welling from a cut—
or flecks of poppy in the tar-grass scented summer air
on a wind-struck hillside outside Fano—
If I said, her one red earring tugging at her silky lobe,
If she tells fortunes with a deck of fallen leaves
Until it comes out right—
Rouged nipple, mouth—
(How could you not love a woman
Who cheats at the Tarot?)
Red, I said. Sudden, red.
THE PROBLEM OF DESCRIBING TREES
The aspen glitters in the wind
And that delights us.
The leaf flutters, turning,
Because that motion in the heat of August
Protects its cells from drying out. Likewise the leaf
of the cottonwood.
The gene pool threw up a wobbly stem
And the tree danced. No.
The tree capitalized.
No. There are limits to saying,
In language, what the tree did.
It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us.
Dance with me, dancer. Oh, I will.
Mountains, sky,
The aspen doing something in the wind.
WINGED AND ACID DARK
A sentence with “dappled shadow” in it.
Something not sayable
spurting from the morning silence,
secret as a thrush.
The other man, the officer, who brought onions
and wine and sacks of flour,
the major with the swollen knee,
wanted intelligent conversation afterward.
Having no choice, she provided that, too.
Potsdamer Platz, May 1945.
When the first one was through he pried her mouth open.
Bashō told Rensetsu to avoid sensational materials.
If the horror of the world were the truth of the world,
he said, there would be no one to say it
and no one to say it to.
I think he recommended describing the slightly frenzied
swarming of insects near a waterfall.
Pried her mouth open and spit in it.
We pass these things on,
probably, because we are what we can imagine.
Something not sayable in the morning silence.
The mind hungering after likenesses. “Tender sky,” etc.,
curves the swallows trace in air.
A SWARM OF DAWNS, A FLOCK OF RESTLESS NOONS
There’s a lot to be written in the Book of Errors.
The elderly redactor is blind, for all practical purposes,
He has no imagination, and field mice have gnawed away
His source text for their nesting. I loved you first, I think,
When you stood in the kitchen sunlight and the lazy motes
Of summer dust while I sliced a nectarine for Moroccan salad
And the seven league boots of your private grief. Maybe
The syntax is a little haywire there. Left to itself,
Wire must act like Paul Klee with a pencil. Hay
Is the old English word for strike. You strike down
Grass, I guess, when it is moan. Mown. The field mice
Devastated the monastery garden. Maybe because it was summer
And the dusks were
full of marsh hawks and the nights were soft
With owls, they couldn’t leave the herbs alone: gnawing the roots
Of rosemary, nibbling at sage and oregano and lemon thyme.
It’s too bad eglantine isn’t an herb, because it’s a word
I’d like to use here. Her coloring was a hybrid
Of rubbed amber and the little flare of dawn rose in the kernel
Of an almond. It’s a wonder to me that I have fingertips.
The knife was very sharp. The scented rose-orange moons,
Quarter moons, of fruit fell to the cutting board
So neatly it was as if two people lived in separate cities
And walked to their respective bakeries in the rain. Her bakery
Smelled better than his. The sour cloud of yeast from sourdough
Hung in the air like the odor of creation. They both bought
Sliced loaves, they both walked home, they both tripped
In the entry to their separate kitchens, and the spilled slices
Made the exact same pattern on the floor. The nectarines
Smelled like the Book of Luck. There was a little fog
Off the bay at sundown in which the waning moon swam laps.
The Miwoks called it Moon of the only Credit Card.
I would have given my fingertips to touch your cheekbone,
And I did. That night the old monk knocked off early. He was making it
All up anyway, and he ’d had a bit of raisin wine at vespers.
BREACH AND ORISON
1. Terror of Beginnings
What are the habits of paradise?
It likes the light. It likes a few pines
on a mass of eroded rock in summer.
You can’t tell up there if rock and air
Are the beginning or the end.
What would you do if you were me? she said.
If I were you-you, or if I were you-me?
If you were me-me.
If I were you-you, he said, I’d do exactly
What you’re doing.
—All it is is sunlight on granite.
Pines casting shadows in the early sun.
Wind in the pines like the faint rocking
of a crucifix dangling
From a rear-view mirror at a stop sign.
2. The palmer method
The answer was
The sound of water, what
What, what, the sprinkler
Said, the question
Of resilvering the mirror
Or smashing it
Once and for all the
Tea in China-
Town getting out of this film
Noir intact or—damaged
As may be—with tact
Was not self-evident
(they fired the rewrite man).
Winters are always touch
And go, it rained,
It hovered on the cusp
Between a drizzle
And a shower, it was
A reverie and inconsolable.
There but for the grace
Of several centuries
Of ruthless exploitation,
We said, hearing
Rumors, or maybe whimpers
From the cattle car—
The answer was within
A radius of several
Floor plans for the house
Desire was always building
And destroying, the
Produce man misted
Plums and apple-pears
The color of halogen
Street lamps in a puddle.
They trod as carefully
As haste permitted,
She wept beside him
In the night.
3. Habits of paradise
Maybe if I made the bed,
It would help. Would the modest diligence
Seem radiant, provoke a radiance?
(outside aspens glittering in the wind.)
If I saw the sleek stroke of moving darkness
Was a hawk, high up, nesting
In the mountain’s face, and if,
For once, I didn’t want to be the hawk,
Would that help? Token of earnest,
Spent coin of summer, would the wind
Court me then, and would that be of assistance?
The woman who carries the bowl
Bows low in your presence, bows to the ground.
It doesn’t matter what she ’s really thinking.
Compassion is formal. Suffering is the grass.
She is not first thought, not the urgency.
The man made of fire drinks. The man
Made of cedar drinks.
Two kinds of birds are feasting in the cottonwoods.
She sprinkles millet for the ones that feast on grief.
She strews tears for the thirsty ones
Desire draws south when the leaves begin to turn.
THE WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION
When I was a child my father every morning—
Some mornings, for a time, when I was ten or so,
My father gave my mother a drug called antabuse.
It makes you sick if you drink alcohol.
They were little yellow pills. He ground them
In a glass, dissolved them in water, handed her
The glass and watched her closely while she drank.
It was the late nineteen forties, a time,
A social world, in which the men got up
And went to work, leaving the women with the children.
His wink at me was a nineteen-forties wink.
He watched her closely so she couldn’t “pull
A fast one” or “put anything over” on a pair
As shrewd as the two of us. I hear those phrases
In old movies and my mind begins to drift.
The reason he ground the medications fine
Was that the pills could be hidden under the tongue
And spit out later. The reason that this ritual
Occurred so early in the morning—I was told,
And knew it to be true—was that she could
If she wanted, induce herself to vomit,
So she had to be watched until her system had
Absorbed the drug. Hard to render, in these lines,
The rhythm of the act. He ground two of them
To powder in a glass, filled it with water,
Handed it to her, and watched her drink.
In my memory, he ’s wearing a suit, gray,
Herringbone, a white shirt she had ironed.
Some mornings, as in the comics we read
When Dagwood went off early to placate
Mr. Dithers, leaving Blondie with crusts
Of toast and yellow rivulets of egg yolk
To be cleared before she went shopping—
On what the comic called a shopping spree—
With Trixie, the next-door neighbor, my father
Would catch an early bus and leave the task
Of vigilance to me. “Keep an eye on Mama, pardner.”
You know the passage in the Aeneid? The man
Who leaves the burning city with his father
On his shoulders, holding his young son’s hand,
Means to do well among the flaming arras
And the falling columns while the blind prophet,
Arms upraised, howls from the inner chamber,
“Great Troy is fallen. Great Troy is no more.”
Slumped in a bathrobe, penitent and biddable,
My mother at the kitchen table gagged and drank,
Drank and gagged. We get our first moral idea
About the world—about justice and power,
Gender and the order of things—from somewhere.
AFTER THE WINDS
My friend’s older sister’s third husband’s daughter—
That’s about as long as a line of verse should get—
Karmic debris? A field anthropologist’s kinship map?
Just sailed by me on the Berkeley street. A student
of complex mathematical systems, a pretty girl,
Ash-colored hair. I might have changed her diapers.
And that small frown might be her parents’ lives.
Desire that hollows us out and hollows us out,
That kills us and kills us and raises us up and
Raises us up. Always laughable from the outside:
