Robert Hass

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. Potsdamerplatz, 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.

1 A French scholar says he affected the Chinese manner. When he took his friends into the countryside To look at blossoms, they all saw Chinese blossoms. He dressed accordingly and wept for the wild geese of Shosho. 2 One year after making love through the short midsummer night He walked home at dawn and noticed that the river Oi Had sunk two feet. The following year was better. He saw bubbles of crab-froth among the river reeds.

A man talking to his ex-wife on the phone. He has loved her voice and listens with attention to every modulation of its tone. Knowing it intimately. Not knowing what he wants from the sound of it, from the tendered civility. He studies, out the window, the seed shapes of the broken pods of ornamental trees. The kind that grow in everyone’s garden, that no one but horticulturists can name. Four arched chambers of pale green, tiny vegetal proscenium arches, a pair of black tapering seeds bedded in each chamber. A wish geometry, miniature, Indian or Persian, lovers or gods in their apartments. Outside, white, patient animals, and tangled vines, and rain.

Everyone comes here from a long way off (is a line from a poem I read last night). *     *     * Driving up 80 in the haze, they talked and talked. (Smoke in the air shimmering from wildfires.) His story was sad and hers was roiled, troubled. *     *     * Alternatively: A man and a woman, old friends, are in a theater watching a movie in which a man and a woman, old friends, are driving through summer on a mountain road. The woman is describing the end of her marriage and sobbing, shaking her head and laughing and sobbing. The man is watching the road, listening, his own more diffuse unhappiness in abeyance, and because, in the restaurant before the film the woman had been describing the end of her marriage and cried, they are not sure whether they are in the theater or on the mountain road, and when the timber truck comes suddenly around the bend, they both flinch. *     *     * He found that it was no good trying to tell what happened that day. Everything he said seemed fictional the moment that he said it, the rain, the scent of her hair, what she said as she was leaving, and why it was important for him to explain that the car had been parked under eucalyptus on a hillside, and how velvety and blurred the trees looked through the windshield; not, he said, that making fictions might not be the best way of getting at it, but that nothing he said had the brute, abject, unassimilated quality of a wounding experience: the ego in any telling was already seeing itself as a character, and a character, he said, was exactly what he was not at that moment, even as he kept wanting to explain to someone, to whomever would listen, that she had closed the door so quietly and so firmly that the beads of rain on the side window didn’t even quiver. *     *     * Names for involuntary movements of the body— squirm, wince, flinch, and shudder— sound like a law firm in Dickens: “Mr. Flinch took off his black gloves as if he were skinning his hands.” “Quiver dipped the nib of his pen into the throat of the inkwell.” *     *     * The receptionist at the hospital morgue told him to call the city medical examiner’s office, but you only got a recorded voice on weekends. *     *     * Setup without the punchline: Three greenhorns are being measured for suits by a very large tailor on Hester Street. *     *     * Once there were two sisters called Knock Me and Sock Me; their best friend was a bear named Always Arguing. What kind of animals were the sisters? one child asked. Maybe they could be raccoons, said the other. Or pandas, said the first. They could be pandas. *     *     * “Why?” he asked. “Because she was lonely, and angry,” said the friend who knew her better, “and she’d run out of stories. Or come to the one story.” *     *     * It is good to sit down to birthday cake with children, who think it is the entire point of life and who, therefore, respect each detail of the ceremony. There ought to be a rule, he thought, for who gets to lick the knife that cuts the cake and the rule should have its pattern somewhere in the winter stars. Which do you add to the tea first, he’d asked, the sugar or the milk? And the child had said, instantly: “The milk.” (Laws as cool and angular as words:angular,sidereal.) *     *     * Stories about the distribution of wealth: Once upon a time there was an old man and an old women who were very, very poor. *     *     * How Eldie Got Her Name The neighborhood had been so dangerous, she said, there was one summer when the mailmen refused to deliver the mail. Her mother never appeared and her grandmother, who had bought a handgun for protection and had also taught her how to use it, would walk her to the post office for the sweet, singsong, half-rhymed letters that smelled, or that she imagined smelled, of Florida. She had, when she was ten, shot at an intruder climbing in the window. The roar, she said, was tremendous and she doesn’t know to this day whether she hit the man or not. (A big-boned young woman, skin the color of the inside of some light-colored hazelnut confection, auburn eyes, some plucked string of melancholy radiating from her whole body when she spoke.) Did her mama come back? They had asked. She never came back. The mail started up again but the letters stopped. Turned out she was good in school, and that was what saved her. She loved the labor of schoolwork. Loved finishing a project and contemplating the neatness of her script. Her grandmother shook her head, sometimes, amused and proud, and called her “Little Diligence.” *     *     * Punchline without the setup: And the three nuns from Immaculate Conception nodded and smiled as they passed, because they thought he was addressing them in Latin. *     *     * He had known, as long as he’d known anything, that he had a father somewhere. When he was twelve, his mother told him why he had no shadow. *     *     * Because she, not her sister, answered the door, she was the first to hear the news. *     *     * A Ballad: He loved to watch that woman sew. She let her hair grow long for show. Riddle’s a needle (a refrain might go) and plainly said is thread. *     *     * She looked beautiful, and looked her age, too. She’d had a go at putting herself together; she had always had the confidence that, with a face like hers, a few touches to represent the idea of a put-together look would do, like some set designer’s genius minimalism. It had a slightly harridan effect and he remembered that it wasn’t what was headlong or slapdash about her, but the way they gestured, like a quotation, at an understanding of elegance it would have been boring to spell out, that had at first dazzled him about her. He felt himself stirring at this recognition, and at a certain memory that attended it, and then laughed at the thought that he had actually stimulated himself with an analysis of her style, and she said, as if she were remembering the way he could make her insecure, “What? What are you smiling about?” and he said, “Nothing.” And she said, “Oh, yes. Right. I remember nothing.” *     *     * Two jokes walk into a bar. A cage went in search of a bird. A boy walks out in the morning with a gun. Three rabbis walk into a penguin. *     *     * In the other world the girls were named Eleanor and Filina, and one night it was very warm and they could not sleep for the heat and the stillness, and they went outside, beyond the wall of their parents’ garden and into a meadow. It was a dark night, moonless, and the stars were so thick they seemed to shudder, and the sisters stood a long time in the sweet smell of the cooling grasses, looking at the sky and listening in the silence. After a while they heard a stirring and saw that a pair of bright eyes was watching them from the woods’ edge. “Maybe it’s their friend, the bear,” one of the children said. “I don’t like this story,” said the other.

Don’t worry, spiders, I keep house casually. New Year’s Day— everything is in blossom! I feel about average. The snow is melting and the village is flooded with children. Goes out, comes back— the love life of a cat. Mosquito at my ear— does he think I’m deaf? Under the evening moon the snail is stripped to the waist. Even with insects— some can sing, some can’t. All the time I pray to Buddha I keep on killing mosquitoes. Napped half the day; no one punished me!

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations “How like a well-kept garden is your soul.” “How like a well-kept garden is your soul.” The quotation is from Gray’s translation of Paul Verlaine’s “Clair de lune,” from Gray’s book Silverpoints(1893). John Gray’s translation of Verlaine John Gray’s translation of Verlaine The quotation is from Gray’s translation of Paul Verlaine’s “Clair de lune,” from Gray’s book Silverpoints(1893). & Baudelaire’s Baudelaire’s French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) butcher in 1861 shorted him four centimes on a pound of tripe. tripe Cow’s stomach, prepared for human consumption He thought himself a clever man and, wiping the calves’ blood from his beefy hands, gazed briefly at what Tennyson called at what Tennyson called Not an actual phrase by Tennyson. Possibly a play on “Hateful is the dark-blue sky”, from Tennyson’s “The Lotos-eaters” “the sweet blue sky.” It was a warm day. What clouds there were were made of sugar tinged with blood. They shed, faintly, amid the clatter of carriages new settings of the songs Moravian Moravian Could refer to either a person from Moravia, a region of the Czech Republic, or a member of the Moravian Church. virgins sang on wedding days. The poet is a monarch of the clouds The poet is a monarch of the clouds Translation from Charles Baudelaire’s “L’Albatros”: “Le Poëte est semblable au prince des nuées” (line 13) & Swinburne Swinburne [...] “trod,” he actually wrote, “by no tropic foot,” A slight variant, from Swinburne’s elegy for Baudelaire, “Ave Atque Vale” : “trod by no tropic feet”. on his northern coast “ trod,” he actually wrote, “by no tropic foot,” Swinburne [...] “trod,” he actually wrote, “by no tropic foot,” A slight variant, from Swinburne’s elegy for Baudelaire, “Ave Atque Vale” : “trod by no tropic feet”. composed that lovely elegy elegy A melancholy poem that laments a person’s death but ends in consolation. See more in the Glossary of Poetic Terms. and then found out Baudelaire was still alive found out Baudelaire was still alive Baudelaire died August 31, 1867, but his death was erroneously reported four months earlier, in April of 1867. According to Swinburne biographer Edmund Gosse, “Baudelaire came to life again, and Swinburne was on the point of tearing up his elegy. However, Baudelaire died some months later, and, after a delay of eleven years, “Ave atque Vale” was at length included in the volume of 1878.” Read “Ave Atque Vale” here. whom he had lodged dreamily in a “deep division of prodigious breasts.” “deep division of prodigious breasts.” A direct quotation from Swinburne’s poem “Ave Atque Vale” Surely the poet is monarch of the clouds. He hovers, like a lemon-colored kite, He hovers, like a lemon-colored kite, An allusion to Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “The Windhover” over spring afternoons in the nineteenth century while Marx in the library while Marx in the library Karl Marx (1818-1883), political economist, researched works in the reading room of the British Museum in London for his major publication,Das Kapital gloom studies the birth rate of the weavers of Tilsit Tilsit A town in what was East Prussia, now named Sovetsk, Russia. Marx mentions the 1807 Peace Treaties of Tilsit in his 1870 correspondence with Friedrich Engels. and that gentle man Bakunin Bakunin Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876) was a Russian anarchist who participated in the Czech Rebellion of 1848. Bakunin met Karl Marx in Paris, and later Bakunin’s anarchist faction would clash with Marx’s socialist faction at a congress of the International Working Men’s Association, and Marx’s leadership prevailed and Bakunin and his men were expelled from the association. Bakunin had stood for violent overthrow, while Marx believed that existing political systems should be reformed into socialism. Compare to these lines from Larry Levis’ poem “At the Grave of My Guardian Angel: St. Louis Cemetery, New Orleans” : “And without beauty, Bakunin will go on making his forlorn & unreliable little bombs in the cold” , home after fingerfucking the countess, applies his numb hands to the making of bombs.

Summoned by conscious recollection, she would be smiling, they might be in a kitchen talking, before or after dinner. But they are in this other room, the window has many small panes, and they are on a couch embracing. He holds her as tightly as he can, she buries herself in his body. Morning, maybe it is evening, light is flowing through the room. Outside, the day is slowly succeeded by night, succeeded by day. The process wobbles wildly and accelerates: weeks, months, years. The light in the room does not change, so it is plain what is happening. They are trying to become one creature, and something will not have it. They are tender with each other, afraid their brief, sharp cries will reconcile them to the moment when they fall away again. So they rub against each other, their mouths dry, then wet, then dry. They feel themselves at the center of a powerful and baffled will. They feel they are an almost animal, washed up on the shore of a world— or huddled against the gate of a garden— to which they can’t admit they can never be admitted.

All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking. The idea, for example, that each particular erases the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown- faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk of that black birch is, by his presence, some tragic falling off from a first world of undivided light. Or the other notion that, because there is in this world no one thing to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds, a word is elegy to what it signifies. We talked about it late last night and in the voice of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone almost querulous. After a while I understood that, talking this way, everything dissolves:justice, pine, hair, woman, you

Recurrences. Coppery light hesitates again in the small-leaved Japanese plum. Summer and sunset, the peace of the writing desk and the habitual peace of writing, these things form an order I only belong to in the idleness of attention. Last light rims the blue mountain and I almost glimpse what I was born to, not so much in the sunlight or the plum tree as in the pulse that forms these lines.

This morning a cat—bright orange—pawing at the one patch of new grass in the sand-and tanbark-colored leaves. And last night the sapphire of the raccoon's eyes in the beam of the flashlight. He was climbing a tree beside the house, trying to get onto the porch, I think, for a wad of oatmeal Simmered in cider from the bottom of the pan we'd left out for the birds. And earlier a burnished, somewhat dazed woodchuck, his coat gleaming with spring, Loping toward his burrow in the roots of a tree among the drying winter's litter Of old leaves on the floor of the woods, when I went out to get the New York Times. And male cardinals whistling back and forth—sireeep, sreeep, sreeep— Sets of three sweet full notes, weaving into and out of each other like the triplet rhymes in medieval poetry, And the higher, purer notes of the tufted titmice among them, High in the trees where they were catching what they could of the early sun. And a doe and two yearlings, picking their way along the worrying path they'd made through the gully, their coats the color of the forest floor, Stopped just at the roots of the great chestnut where the woodchuck's burrow was, Froze, and the doe looked back over her shoulder at me for a long moment, and leapt forward, Her young following, and bounded with that almost mincing precision in the landing of each hoof Up the gully, over it, and out of sight. So that I remembered Dreaming last night that a deer walked into the house while I was writing at the kitchen table, Came in the glass door from the garden, looked at me with a stilled defiant terror, like a thing with no choices, And, neck bobbing in that fragile-seeming, almost mechanical mix of arrest and liquid motion, came to the table And snatched a slice of apple, and stood, and then quietened, and to my surprise did not leave again. And those little captains, the chickadees, swift to the feeder and swift away. And the squirrels with their smoke-plume tails trailing digging in the leaves to bury or find buried— I'm told they don't remember where they put things, that it's an activity of incessant discovery— Nuts, tree-fall proteins, whatever they forage from around the house of our leavings, And the flameheaded woodpecker at the suet with his black-and-white ladderback elegant fierceness— They take sunflower seeds and stash them in the rough ridges of the tree's bark Where the beaks of the smoke-and-steel blue nuthatches can't quite get at them— Though the nuthatches sometimes seem to get them as they con the trees methodically for spiders' eggs or some other overwintering insect's intricately packaged lump of futurity Got from its body before the cold came on. And the little bat in the kitchen lightwell— When I climbed on a chair to remove the sheet of wimpled plastic and let it loose, It flew straight into my face and I toppled to the floor, chair under me, And it flared down the hall and did what seemed a frantic reconnoiter of the windowed, high-walled living room. And lit on a brass firelog where it looked like a brown and ash grey teenaged suede glove with Mephistophelean dreams, And then, spurt of black sperm, up, out the window, and into the twilight woods. All this life going on about my life, or living a life about all this life going on, Being a creature, whatever my drama of the moment, at the edge of the raccoon's world— He froze in my flashlight beam and looked down, no affect, just looked, The ringtail curled and flared to make him look bigger and not to be messed with— I was thinking he couldn't know how charming his comic-book robber's mask was to me, That his experience of his being and mine of his and his of mine were things entirely apart, Though there were between us, probably, energies of shrewd and respectful tact, based on curiosity and fear— I knew about his talons whatever he knew about me— And as for my experience of myself, it comes and goes, I'm not sure it's any one thing, as my experience of these creatures is not, And I know I am often too far from it or too near, glad to be rid of it which is why it was such a happiness, The bright orange of the cat, and the first pool of green grass-leaves in early April, and the birdsong—that orange and that green not colors you'd set next to one another in the human scheme. And the crows' calls, even before you open your eyes, at sunup.