by Robert Hass
The most competent of men, had served in the infantry
In the Meuse-Argonne—brings me, in the dream,
To tears. There is a view onto a garden from the upper room
Where he stands with his back pinned to the wall.
He has begun to weep, his shoulders shaking.
Now, outside the dream, I remember overhearing
Him describe the battle of–was it Belleau Wood?—
The Argonne forest??—as a butcher shop, also in his dry,
Slightly barking voice, and then he put down a card,
My parents and my aunt and he played bridge—
And said, “A very smoky butcher shop.” Now,
Not in the dream, an image of the small cut glass dish
Into which my aunt put small festively colored candies
That were called “a bridge mix.” And the memory
of a taste like anise, like a California summer.
Though I don’t know how I know it, I know
That there had been a long and lavish party
on the lawn outside which resembles, oddly,
The Luxembourg Gardens and, somewhere
In the dream, I notice, to my surprise, a bird,
Brilliantly yellow, a European goldfinch, perhaps,
Red in the wing tips, high up among the leaves
of an espaliered pear tree, on which each of the pears
Has been wrapped in a translucent paper packet.
I experience my interest in the bird as irresponsible.
My uncle is holding my hand very tightly and I
Lean just a little to the left to see the bird more clearly—
I think it is red on the wing tips—-and from that angle
I can see the child’s body slumped under the pear tree,
And think, “Well, that explains his panic,” and,
When I look again, the bird, of course, has flown.
THE DRY MOUNTAIN AIR
our Grandma Dahling arrived from the train station
In a limousine: an old Lincoln touring car
With immense, black, shiny, rounded fenders
And a silver ornament of Nike on the hood.
She wore a long black coat and pearl-gray gloves.
White hair, very soft white, and carefully curled.
Also rimless glasses with thin gold frames.
once in the house, having presented ourselves
To be hugged completely, the important thing
Was to watch her take off her large, black,
Squarish, thatched, and feathered confection of a hat.
She raised both hands above her head, elbows akimbo,
Lifting the black scrim of a veil in the process,
Removed a pin from either side, and lifted it,
Gingerly, straight up, as if it were a saucer of water
That I must not spill, and then she set it down,
Carefully, solicitously even, as if it were a nest
of fledgling birds (which it somewhat resembled),
And then there arrived, after she had looked at the hat
For a moment to see that it wasn’t going to move,
The important thing. Well, she would say, well, now,
In a musical German-inflected English, touching together
Her two soft, white, ungloved hands from which emanated
The slightly spiced, floral scent of some hand lotion
That made the hands of great-grandmothers singularly soft,
And regard us, and shake her head just a little, but for a while,
To express her wonder at our palpable bodies before her,
And then turn to her suitcase on the sea chest in the hall,
Not having been transferred yet to her bedroom by my father
Who had hauled it up the long, precipitous front stairs;
She flipped open the brass clasps and the shield-shaped lock
She had not locked and opened the case to a lavender interior
From which rose the scent of chocolate, mingled faintly
With the smell of anise from the Christmas cookies
That she always baked. But first were the paper mats
From the dining car of the California Zephyr, adorned
With soft pastel images of what you might see
From the vista Car: Grand Canyon, Mount Shasta,
A slightly wrinkled Bridal veil Falls, and, serene, contemplative
Almost, a view of Lake Louise, intimate to me because,
Although it was Canadian, it bore my mother’s name.
My brother and I each got two views. He, being the eldest,
Always took Grand Canyon, which I found obscurely terrifying
And so being second was always a relief. I took Lake Louise
And he took Half Dome and the waterfall, and she looked surprised
That we were down to one and handed me the brooding angel,
Shasta. And then from under layers of shimmery print dresses,
She produced, as if relieved that it wasn’t lost, the largest chocolate bar
That either of us had ever seen. Wrapped in dignified brown paper,
on which ceremonial, silvery capital letters must have announced—
I couldn’t read—the sort of thing it was. These were the war years.
Chocolate was rationed. The winey, dark scent rose like manna
In the air and filled the room. My brother, four years older,
Says this never happened. Not once. She never visited the house
on Jackson Street with its sea air and the sound of foghorns
At the Gate. I thought it might help to write it down here
That the truth of things might be easier to come to
on a quiet evening in the clear, dry, mountain air.
FIRST THINGS AT THE LAST MINUTE
The white-water rush of some warbler’s song.
Last night, a few strewings of ransacked moonlight
on the sheets. You don’t know what slumped forward
In the nineteen-forties taxi or why they blamed you
or what the altered landscape, willowy, riparian,
Had to do with the reasons why everyone
Should be giving things away, quickly,
From a spendthrift sorrow that, because it can’t bear
The need to be forgiven, keeps looking for something
To forgive. The motion of washing machines
Is called agitation. object constancy is a term
Devised to indicate what a child requires
From days. Clean sheets are an example
of something that, under many circumstances,
A person can control. The patterns moonlight makes
Are chancier, and dreams, well, dreams
Will have their way with you, their way
With you, will have their way.
POET’S WORK
1.
You carry a saucer of clear water,
Smelling faintly of lemon, that spills
Into the dark roots of what
Was I saying? Hurt or dance, the stunned
Hours, arguments for and against:
There’s a tap here somewhere.
2.
This dream: on white linen, in the high ceiling’d room,
Marie and Julia had spread baskets of focaccia,
&n
bsp; A steaming zucchini torte, ham in thin, almost deliquescent slices,
Mottled ovals of salami, around a huge bowl in which chunks of crabmeat,
With its sweet, iodine smell of high tide, were strewn
Among quarter moons of sun-colored tomatoes and lettuce leaves
of some species as tender-looking as the child’s death had been.
3.
If there is a way in, it may be
Through the corolla of the cinquefoil
With its pale yellow petals,
In the mixed smell of dust and water
At trailside in the middle reaches of July.
Soft: an almost phospher gleam in twilight.
MOUTH SLIGHTLY OPEN
The body a yellow brilliance and a head
Some orange color from a Chinese painting
Dipped in sunset by the summer gods
Who are also producing that twitchy shiver
In the cottonwoods, less wind than river,
Where the bird you thought you saw
Was, whether you believe what you thought
You saw or not, and then was not, had
Absconded, leaving behind the emptiness
That hums a little in you now, and is not bad
or sad, and only just resembles awe or fear.
The bird is elsewhere now, and you are here.
OLD MOVIE WITH THE SOUND TURNED OFF
The hatcheck girl wears a gown that glows;
The cigarette girl in the black fishnet stockings
And a skirt of black, gauzy, bunched-up tulle
That bobs above the pert muffin of her bottom,
She must be twenty-two, would look like a dancer
In Degas except for the tray of cigarettes that rests
Against her—tummy might have been the decade ’s word,
And the thin black strap which binds it to her neck
And makes the whiteness of her skin seem swan’s-down
White. Some quality in the film stock that they used
Made everything so shiny that the films could not
Not make the whole world look like lingerie, like
Phosphorescent milk with winking shadows in it.
All over the world the working poor put down their coins,
Poured into theaters on Friday nights. The manager raffled—
“Raffled off,” we used to say in San Rafael in my postwar
Childhood into which the custom had persisted—
Sets of dishes in the intermission of the double feature—
of the kind they called Fiestaware. And now
The gangster has come in, surrounded by an entourage
of prizefighters and character actors, all in tuxedos
And black overcoats—except for him. His coat is camel
(Was it the material or the color?—my mind wanders
To earth-colored villages in Samara or Afghanistan).
He is also wearing a white scarf which seems to shimmer
As he takes it off, after he takes off the gray fedora
And hands it to the hatcheck girl. The singer,
In a gown of black taffeta that throws off light
In starbursts, wears black gloves to her elbows
And as she sings, you sense she is afraid.
Not only have I seen this film before—the singer
Shoots the gangster just when he thinks he ’s been delivered
From a nemesis involving his brother, the district attorney,
And a rival mob—I know the grandson of the cigarette girl,
Who became a screenwriter and was blackballed later
Because she raised money for the Spanish Civil War.
or at least that’s the story as I remember it, so that,
When the gangster is clutching his wounded gut
And delivering a last soundless quip and his scarf
Is still looking like the linen in Heaven, I realize
That it is for them a working day and that the dead
will rise uncorrupted and change into flannel slacks,
Hawaiian shirts; the women will put on summer smocks
Made from the material superior dish towels are made of
Now, and they’ll all drive up to Malibu for drinks.
All the dead actors were pretty in their day. Why
Am I watching this movie? you may ask. Well, my beloved,
Down the hall, is probably laboring over a poem
And is not to be disturbed. And look! I have rediscovered
The sweetness and the immortality of art. The actress
Wrote under a pseudonym, died, I think, of cancer of the lungs.
So many of them did. Far better for me to be doing this
(A last lurid patch of fog out of which the phrase “The End”
Comes swimming; the music I can’t hear surging now
Like fate) than reading with actual attention my field guides
Which inform me that the flower of the incense cedar I saw
This morning by the creek is “unisexual, solitary, and terminal.”
EZRA POUND’S PROPOSITION
Beauty is sexual, and sexuality
Is the fertility of the earth and the fertility
of the earth is economics. Though he is no recommendation
For poets on the subject of finance,
I thought of him in the thick heat
of the Bangkok night. Not more than fourteen, she saunters up to you
outside the Shangri-la Hotel
And says, in plausible English,
“How about a party, big guy?”
Here is more or less how it works:
The World Bank arranges the credit and the dam
Floods three hundred villages, and the villagers find their way
To the city where their daughters melt into the teeming streets,
And the dam’s great turbines, beautifully tooled
In Lund or Dresden or Detroit, financed
By Lazard Frères in Paris or the Morgan Bank in New York,
Enabled by judicious gifts from Bechtel of San Francisco
or Halliburton of Houston to the local political elite,
Spun by the force of rushing water,
Have become hives of shimmering silver
And, down river, they throw that bluish throb of light
Across her cheekbones and her lovely skin.
ON VISITING THE DMZ AT PANMUNJON: A HAIBUN
The human imagination does not do very well with large numbers. More than two and a half million people died during the Korean War. It seems that it ought to have taken more time to wreck so many bodies. Five hundred thousand Chinese soldiers died in battle, or of disease. A million South Koreans died, four fifths of them civilians. One million one hundred thousand North Koreans. The terms are inexact and thinking about them can make you sleepy. Not all “South Koreans” were born in the south of Korea; some were born in the north and went south, for reasons of family, or religion, or politics, at the time of the division of the country. Likewise the “North Koreans.” During the war one half of all the houses in the country were destroyed and almost all industrial and public buildings. Pyongyang was bombarded with one thousand bombs per square kilometer in a city that had been the home to four hundred thousand people. Twenty-six thousand American soldiers died in the war. There is no evidence that human beings have absorbed these fac
ts, which ought, at least, to provoke some communal sense of shame. It may be the sheer number of bodies that is hard to hold in mind. That is perhaps why I felt a slight onset of nausea as we were moved from the civilian bus to the military bus at Panmunjon. The young soldiers had been trained to do their jobs and they carried out the transfer of our bodies, dressed for summer in the May heat, with a precision and dispatch that seemed slightly theatrical. They were young men. They wanted to be admired. I found it very hard to describe to myself what I felt about them, whom we had made our instrument.
The flurry of white between the guard towers
—river mist? a wedding party?
is cattle egrets nesting in the willows.
CONSCIOUSNESS
First image is blue sky, nothing in it, and not understood as sky, a field of blue.
The second image is auditory: the moan of a foghorn.
We had been arguing about the nature of consciousness, or avoiding arguing, talking.
Dean had read a book that said that consciousness was like a knock-knock joke, some notion of an answering call having brought it into being which was, finally, itself anticipating an answer from itself, echo of an echo of an echo.
My mind went seven places at once.
One place was a line of ridge somewhere in a dry Western landscape just after sundown, I saw a pair of coyotes appear suddenly on the ridge edge and come to a loping stop and sniff the air and look down toward a valley in the moonlight, tongues out in that way that looks to us like happiness, though it isn’t necessarily; I suppose they were an idea of mammal consciousness come over the event horizon in some pure form, hunter-attention, life-in-the-body attention.
CD said human consciousness shows up in the record as symbolic behavior toward the dead.
My mind also went to Whitman, not interested, he said, in the people who need to say that we all die and life is a suck and a sell and two plus two is four and nothing left over.
I think I respond with such quick hostility to anything that smells like reductionist materialism because it was my father’s worldview.
