by Robert Hass
The English wit who complained of sex that the posture
Was ridiculous had not been struck down by the god
or goddess to whose marble threshing floor offerings
of grapes or olive boughs and flowers or branches
Laden with new fruit or bundles of heavy-headed wheat
Were brought as to any other mystery or power.
My friend sat on the back steps on a summer night
Sick with her dilemma, smoking long cigarettes
While bats veered in the dark and the scraping sound
of a neighbor cleaning a grill with a wire brush
Ratcheted steadily across the backyard fence.
“He’s the nicest man I could imagine,” she had said,
“And I feel like I’m dying.” Probably in her middle thirties
Then. Flea markets on Saturday mornings, family dinners
on Sunday, a family large enough so that there was always
A birthday, a maiden aunt from the old neighborhood
In San Francisco, or a brother-in-law, or some solemn child
Studying a new toy in silence on the couch.
Had not lived where, tearing, or like burnished leaves
In a vortex of wind, the part of you that might observe
The comedy of gasps and moans gives way, does not
Demur. Though she did laugh at herself. An erotic
Attachment one whole winter to the mouth
of a particular television actor—she ’d turn the TV on—
Watch him for a minute with a kind of sick yearning—
Shake her head—turn the TV off—go back to the translation
of van Gogh’s letters which was her project that year—
or do some ironing—that always seemed to calm her—
The sweet iron smell of steam and linen. “Honest to God,”
She’d say, an expression the elderly aunts might have used,
“For Pete ’s sake,” she ’d say, “Get yourself together.”
Hollow flute, or bell not struck, sending out a shimmering
Not-sound, in waves and waves, to the place where the stunned dead
In the not-beginning are gathered to the arms of the living
In the not-noon: the living who grieve, who rage against
And grieve the always solicited, always unattended dead
In the tiered plazas or lush meadows of their gathered
Absence. A man wants a woman that way. A person a person.
Down on all fours, ravenous and humbled. And later—
“Lovers, you remember the shoeshine boys in Quito
In the city market? Missing teeth, unlaced tennis shoes.
They approach you smiling. Their hands are scrofulous,
They have no rules, and they’ll steal anything and so
Would you if you were they.” The old capital has always
Just been sacked, the temple hangings burned, and peasants
In the ruins are roasting the royal swans in a small fire
Coaxed from the sticks of the tax assessor’s Empire chair
Up against a broken wall. Lent: the saints’ bodies
Dressed in purple sacks to be taken off at Easter.
For Magdalen, of course, the resurrection didn’t mean
She’d got him back. It meant she ’d lost him in another way.
It was the voice she loved, the body, not the god
Who, she had been told, ascended to his heaven,
There to disperse tenderness and pity on the earth.
FOR CZESŁAW MIŁOSZ IN KRAKÓW
The fog has hovered off the coast for weeks
And given us a march of brilliant days
You wouldn’t recognize—who have grumbled
So eloquently about gray days on Grizzly Peak—
Unless they put you in mind of puppet pageants
Your poems remember from Lithuanian market towns
Just after the First World War. Here ’s more theater:
A mule-tail doe gave birth to a pair of fawns
A couple of weeks ago just outside your study
In the bed of oxalis by the redwood trees.
Having dropped by that evening, I saw,
Though at first I couldn’t tell what I was seeing,
A fawn, wet and shivering, curled almost
In a ball under the thicket of hazel and toyon.
I’ve read somewhere that does hide the young
As best they can and then go off to browse
And recruit themselves. They can’t graze the juices
In the leaves if they stay to protect the newborns.
It’s the glitch in engineering through which chance
And terror enter on the world. I looked closer
At the fawn. It was utterly still and trembling,
Eyes closed, possibly asleep. I leaned to smell it:
There was hardly a scent. She had licked all traces
of the rank birth-smell away. Do you remember
This fragment from Anacreon?—the context,
of course, was probably erotic: “…her gently,
Like an unweaned fawn left alone in a forest
By its antlered mother, frail, trembling with fright.”
It’s a verse—you will like this detail—found
In the papyrus that wrapped a female mummy
A museum in Cairo was examining in 1956.
I remember the time that a woman in Portland
Asked if you were a reader of Flannery O’Connor.
You winced regretfully, shook your head,
And said, “You know, I don’t agree with the novel.”
I think you haven’t agreed, in this same sense,
With life, never accepted the cruelty in the frame
of things, brooded on your century, and God the Monster,
And the smell of summer grasses in the world
That can hardly be named or remembered
Past the moment of our wading through them,
And the world’s poor salvation in the word. Well,
Dear friend, you resisted. You were not mute.
Mark tells me he has seen the fawns grazing
With their mother in the dusk. Gorging on your roses—
So it seems they made it through the night
And neither dog nor car has got to them just yet.
TIME AND MATERIALS
Gerhard Richter: Abstrakte Bilder
1.
To make layers,
As if they were a steadiness of days:
It snowed; I did errands at a desk;
A white flurry out the window thickening; my tongue
Tasted of the glue on envelopes.
on this day sunlight on red brick, bare trees,
Nothing stirring in the icy air.
on this day a blur of color moving at the gym
Where the heat from bodies
Meets the watery, cold surface of the glass.
Made love, made curry, talked on the phone
To friends, the one whose brother died
Was crying and thinking alternately,
Like someone falling down and getting up
And running and falling and getting up.
2.
The object of this poem is not to annihila
To not annih
> The object of this poem is to report a theft,
In progress, of everything
That is not these words
And their disposition on the page.
The object o f this poem is to report a theft,
In progress of everything that exists
That is not these words
And their disposition on the page.
The object of his poe is t repor a theft
In rogres f ever hing at xists
Th is no ese w rds
And their disp sit on o the pag
3.
To score, to scar, to smear, to streak,
To smudge, to blur, to gouge, to scrape.
“Action painting,” i.e.,
The painter gets to behave like time.
4.
The typo wound be “paining.”
(To abrade.)
5.
or to render time and stand outside
The horizontal rush of it, for a moment
To have the sensation of standing outside
The greenish rush of it.
6.
Some vertical gesture then, the way that anger
or desire can rip a life apart,
Some wound of color.
ART AND LIFE
You know that milkmaid in Vermeer? Entirely absorbed
In the act of pouring a small stream of milk—
Shocking in the Mauritshuis Museum in The Hague
To have seen how white it is, and alive, as seeing people
Reading their poetry or singing in a chorus, you think
You see the soul is an animal going about its business,
A squirrel, its coat sheening toward fall, stretching
Its body down a slim branch to gather one ripe haw
From a hawthorne, testing the branch with its weight,
Stilling as it sinks, then gingerly reaching out a paw.
There is nothing less ambivalent than animal attention
And so you honor it, admire it even, that her attention,
Turned away from you, is so alive, and you are melancholy
Nevertheless. It is best, of course, to be the one engaged
And being thought of, to be the pouring of the milk.
In The Hague, in the employee ’s cafeteria, I wondered
Who the restorer was. The blondish young woman
In the boxy, expensive Japanese coat picking at a dish
of cottage cheese—cottage cheese and a pastry? The sugar
on the bun, long before she woke up, had suffered
Its transformation in the oven. She seems to be a person
Who has counted up the cost and decided what to settle for.
It’s in the way her soft, abstracted mouth
Receives the bits of bread and the placid sugars.
or the older man, thinning brown hair, brown tweed coat,
Brown buckskin shoes like the place where dust and sunset
Meet and disappear. A mouth formed by private ironies,
As if he ’d sat silent in too many meetings with people
He thought more powerful and less intelligent than he.
or the whip-thin guy with black, slicked-back hair
And a scarified zigzag flash of lightning at the temple?
I didn’t know if there was a type. I wanted
To interview her, or him. What do you do with your life?
I am an acolyte. I peel time, with absolute care,
From thin strips of paint on three-hundred-year-old canvas.
I make the milk milk that flows from the gray-brown paint
of a pitcher held by a represented woman, young, rose
And tender yellow for the cheek the light is lucky enough
To seem to touch, by a certain window that refracts it.
I am the servant of a gesture so complete, a body
So at peace, it has become a thought, entirely its own,
And, though it stills desire, infinitely to be desired,
Though neither known nor possessed by you
or anyone else. The man in black must be an assistant curator.
He looks like he thinks he is a work of art. Everywhere
In The Hague the low-lying smell of sea salt.
We don’t know a thing about the mother of Vermeer.
obviously he displaced her nipple there, took
The whole Madonna tradition and turned it into light and milk
By some meticulous habit of mind the geometries
of composition worked in him. And her: strong Dutch body,
Almost tender light, the plainness of the room,
The rich red rug her skin, reddened a little
From the roughness of a towel perhaps, picks up.
And the upward thrust of what longing stirs in you
Toward what dark and what dazed, grateful afterward.
one of you touches the vein in the other’s neck,
Feels the pulse there as a shock, the current of a river
or the drawing down of milk. Who wants Amida’s Western Paradise
When there is all this world for tongue to taste,
Fingers to touch, small hairs like spun silkweed
Furling on another’s arms and legs and lower back.
And so you talk. Always then the other shock
of the singular, lived life, a mother in a rest home,
Maybe, a difficult person, grievous or vindictive.
The gossip of the other servants. A brother who works
As a hosteler at an inn and has grand plans.
You listen. You learned long ago the trick
of not thinking what you’re going to say next
When the other person’s speaking. Part of you
Drinks her in like milk. Part of you begins to notice
That she is trying out self-deceptions in the account
of some difficulty, lazily formulated. You watch her
Shake her head in self-correction; you notice
That she has a mind that wants to get things right.
The tremor of her body makes a nuzzling notion
Along your flank and you reach down to feel again
The wetness which is what we have instead of the luminosity
of paint. Afterward, in one of those tracks the mind
Returns to when it’s on its feet again, she speaks
of Hans, the butler, how he bullies the girls,
Prays vigorously at hourly intervals on Sunday.
It is Sunday. Now she’s getting dressed. You’ve agreed
To call the cab and take her to her mother
Up in Gronigen. She ’s grateful, a little teary,
Makes her first small gesture of possession,
Brushing off your coat. outside you can hear
The hoofbeats of shod horses on the cobbles.
It’s the moment when the burden of another person’s life
Seems insupportable. We want to be reborn incessantly
But actually doing it begins—have you noticed?
To seem redundant. Here is the life that chose you
And the one you chose. Here is the brush, horsehair,
Hair of the badger, the goat’s beard, the sable,
And here is the smell of paint. The volatile, sharp oils
of lins
eed, rapeseed. Here is the stench of the essence
of pinewood in a can of turpentine. Here is the hand,
Flick of wrist, tendon-ripple of the brushstroke. Here—
Cloud, lake water lifting on a summer morning,
Ash and ash and chalky ash—is the stickiness of paint
Adhering to the woven flax of the canvas, here
Is the faithfulness of paint on paint on paint on paint.
Something stays this way, something comes alive
We cannot have, can have because we cannot have it.
DOMESTIC INTERIORS
1.
A house of old, soft, gray, salt-lustered wood,
Windows onto dune grass and a beach.
His wife is upstairs working in her study
When the doorbell rings. The young man at the door,
A Jehovah’s Witness, has an Adam’s apple
So protuberant it’s conducting a flirtation
With deformity. The man, trying not to stare,
Has a saddened panicked premonition
That his wife needs help, and then a stronger feeling
That he has no wife, has never had a wife.
The young man, eyes contracted by concentration,
Is talking about what he calls “the first awakening.”
2.
When the lights went out, she drove to town
And bought a lot of candles. The whole village
Was in the general store buying flashlights,
Batteries, oil lamps, oil lamp mantles, fuel,
Telling the story of where they were
When everything went dark, lingering
Awhile in this sudden village in the village.
When she got home, the power was restored.
That’s how the radio described it: “power restored.”
3.
She woke him to say that everything was loud,
The night bird’s song, the white of the daisies
In the garden in the dark. Then she woke him
To describe headlights on the road across the bay:
They seemed as lonely as the earth. He said
At that hour it must have been a fisherman,
