Robert Hass

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.

When the swordsman fell in Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai in the gray rain, in the Cinemascope and the Tokugawa dynasty, he fell straight as a pine, he fell as Ajax fell in Homer in chanted dactyls and the tree was so huge the woodsman returned for two days to that lucky place before he was done with the sawing and on the third day he brought his uncle. They stacked logs in the resinous air, hacking the small limbs off, tying those bundles separately. The slabs near the root were quartered and still they were awkwardly large; the logs from the midtree they halved: ten bundles and four great piles of fragrant wood, moons and quarter moons and half moons ridged by the saw’s tooth. The woodsman and the old man his uncle are standing in midforest on a floor of pine silt and spring mud. They have stopped working because they are tired and because I have imagined no pack animal or primitive wagon. They are too canny to call in neighbors and come home with a few logs after three days’ work. They are waiting for me to do something or for the overseer of the Great Lord to come and arrest them. How patient they are! The old man smokes a pipe and spits. The young man is thinking he would be rich if he were already rich and had a mule. Ten days of hauling and on the seventh day they’ll probably be caught, go home empty-handed or worse. I don’t know whether they’re Japanese or Mycenaean and there’s nothing I can do. The path from here to that village is not translated. A hero, dying, gives off stillness to the air. A man and a woman walk from the movies to the house in the silence of separate fidelities. There are limits to imagination.

Maybe you need to write a poem about grace. When everything broken is broken, and everything dead is dead, and the hero has looked into the mirror with complete contempt, and the heroine has studied her face and its defects remorselessly, and the pain they thought might, as a token of their earnestness, release them from themselves has lost its novelty and not released them, and they have begun to think, kindly and distantly, watching the others go about their days— likes and dislikes, reasons, habits, fears— that self-love is the one weedy stalk of every human blossoming, and understood, therefore, why they had been, all their lives, in such a fury to defend it, and that no one— except some almost inconceivable saint in his pool of poverty and silence—can escape this violent, automatic life’s companion ever, maybe then, ordinary light, faint music under things, a hovering like grace appears. As in the story a friend told once about the time he tried to kill himself. His girl had left him. Bees in the heart, then scorpions, maggots, and then ash. He climbed onto the jumping girder of the bridge, the bay side, a blue, lucid afternoon. And in the salt air he thought about the word “seafood,” that there was something faintly ridiculous about it. No one said “landfood.” He thought it was degrading to the rainbow perch he’d reeled in gleaming from the cliffs, the black rockbass, scales like polished carbon, in beds of kelp along the coast—and he realized that the reason for the word was crabs, or mussels, clams. Otherwise the restaurants could just put “fish” up on their signs, and when he woke—he’d slept for hours, curled up on the girder like a child—the sun was going down and he felt a little better, and afraid. He put on the jacket he’d used for a pillow, climbed over the railing carefully, and drove home to an empty house. There was a pair of her lemon yellow panties hanging on a doorknob. He studied them. Much-washed. A faint russet in the crotch that made him sick with rage and grief. He knew more or less where she was. A flat somewhere on Russian Hill. They’d have just finished making love. She’d have tears in her eyes and touch his jawbone gratefully. “God,” she’d say, “you are so good for me.” Winking lights, a foggy view downhill toward the harbor and the bay. “You’re sad,” he’d say. “Yes.” “Thinking about Nick?” “Yes,” she’d say and cry. “I tried so hard,” sobbing now, “I really tried so hard.” And then he’d hold her for a while— Guatemalan weavings from his fieldwork on the wall— and then they’d fuck again, and she would cry some more, and go to sleep. And he, he would play that scene once only, once and a half, and tell himself that he was going to carry it for a very long time and that there was nothing he could do but carry it. He went out onto the porch, and listened to the forest in the summer dark, madrone bark cracking and curling as the cold came up. It’s not the story though, not the friend leaning toward you, saying “And then I realized—,” which is the part of stories one never quite believes. I had the idea that the world’s so full of pain it must sometimes make a kind of singing. And that the sequence helps, as much as order helps— First an ego, and then pain, and then the singing.

The radio clicks on—it’s poor swollen America, Up already and busy selling the exhausting obligation Of happiness while intermittently debating whether or not A man who kills fifty people in five minutes With an automatic weapon he has bought for the purpose Is mentally ill. Or a terrorist. Or if terrorists Are mentally ill. Because if killing large numbers of people With sophisticated weapons is a sign of sickness— You might want to begin with fire, our early ancestors Drawn to the warmth of it—from lightning, Must have been, the great booming flashes of it From the sky, the tree shriveled and sizzling, Must have been, an awful power, the odor Of ozone a god’s breath; or grass fires, The wind whipping them, the animals stampeding, Furious, driving hard on their haunches from the terror Of it, so that to fashion some campfire of burning wood, Old logs, must have felt like feeding on the crumbs Of the god’s power and they would tell the story Of Prometheus the thief, and the eagle that feasted On his liver, told it around a campfire, must have been, And then—centuries, millennia—some tribe Of meticulous gatherers, some medicine woman, Or craftsman of metal discovered some sands that, Tossed into the fire, burned blue or flared green, So simple the children could do it, must have been, Or some soft stone rubbed to a powder that tossed Into the fire gave off a white phosphorescent glow. The word for chemistry from a Greek—some say Arabic— Stem associated with metal work. But it was in China Two thousand years ago that fireworks were invented— Fire and mineral in a confined space to produce power— They knew already about the power of fire and water And the power of steam: 100 BC, Julius Caesar’s day. In Alexandria, a Greek mathematician produced A steam-powered turbine engine. Contain, explode. “The earliest depiction of a gunpowder weapon Is the illustration of a fire-lance on a mid-12th-century Silk banner from Dunhuang.” Silk and the silk road. First Arab guns in the early fourteenth century. The English Used cannons and a siege gun at Calais in 1346. Cerigna, 1503: the first battle won by the power of rifles When Spanish “arquebusiers” cut down Swiss pikemen And French cavalry in a battle in southern Italy. (Explosions of blood and smoke, lead balls tearing open The flesh of horses and young men, peasants mostly, Farm boys recruited to the armies of their feudal overlords.) How did guns come to North America? 2014, A headline: DIVERS DISCOVER THE SANTA MARIA One of the ship’s Lombard cannons may have been stolen By salvage pirates off the Haitian reef where it had sunk. And Cortes took Mexico with 600 men, 17 horses, 12 cannons. And LaSalle, 1679, constructed a seven-cannon barque, Le Griffon, and fired his cannons upon first entering the continent’s Interior. The sky darkened by the terror of the birds. In the dream time, they are still rising, swarming, Darkening the sky, the chorus of their cries sharpening As the echo of that first astounding explosion shimmers On the waters, the crew blinking at the wind of their wings. Springfield Arsenal, 1777. Rock Island Arsenal, 1862. The original Henry rifle: a sixteen shot .44 caliber rimfire Lever-action, breech-loading rifle patented—it was an age Of tinkerers—by one Benjamin Tyler Henry in 1860, Just in time for the Civil War. Confederate casualties In battle: about 95,000. Union casualties in battle: About 110,000. Contain, explode. They were throwing Sand into the fire, a blue flare, an incandescent green. The Maxim machine gun, 1914, 400-600 small caliber rounds Per minute. The deaths in combat, all sides, 1914-1918 Was 8,042,189. Someone was counting. Must have been. They could send things whistling into the air by boiling water. The children around the fire must have shrieked with delight 1920: Iraq, the peoples of that place were “restive,” Under British rule and the young Winston Churchill Invented the new policy of “aerial policing,” which amounted, Sources say, to bombing civilians and then pacifying them With ground troops. Which led to the tactic of terrorizing civilian Populations in World War II. Total casualties in that war, Worldwide: soldiers, 21 million; civilians, 27 million. They were throwing sand into the fire. The ancestor who stole Lightning from the sky had his guts eaten by an eagle. Spread-eagled on a rock, the great bird feasting. They are wondering if he is a terrorist or mentally ill. London, Dresden. Berlin. Hiroshima, Nagasaki. The casualties difficult to estimate. Hiroshima: 66,000 dead, 70,000 injured. In a minute. Nagasaki: 39,000 dead, 25,000 injured. There were more people killed, 100,000, in more terrifying fashion in the firebombing Of Tokyo. Two arms races after the ashes settled. The other industrial countries couldn’t get there Fast enough. Contain, burn. One scramble was For the rocket that delivers the explosion that burns humans By the tens of thousands and poisons the earth in the process. They were wondering if the terrorist was crazy. If he was A terrorist, maybe he was just unhappy. The other Challenge afterwards was how to construct machine guns A man or a boy could carry: lightweight, compact, easy to assemble. First a Russian sergeant, a Kalashnikov, clever with guns Built one on a German model. Now the heavy machine gun. The weapon of European imperialism through which A few men trained in gunnery could slaughter native armies In Africa and India and the mountains of Afghanistan, Became “a portable weapon a child can operate.” The equalizer. So the undergunned Vietnamese insurgents Fought off the greatest army in the world. So the Afghans Fought off the Soviet army using Kalashnikovs the CIA Provided to them. They were throwing powders in the fire And dancing. Children’s armies in Africa toting AK-47s That fire thirty rounds a minute. A round is a bullet. An estimated 500 million firearms on the earth. 100 million of them are Kalashnikov-style semi-automatics. They were dancing in Orlando, in a club. Spring night. Gay Pride. The relation of the total casualties to the history Of the weapon that sent exploded metal into their bodies— 30 rounds a minute, or 40, is a beautifully made instrument, And in America you can buy it anywhere—and into the history Of the shaming culture that produced the idea of Gay Pride— They were mostly young men, they were dancing in a club, A spring night. The radio clicks on. Green fire. Blue fire. The immense flocks of terrified birds still rising In wave after wave above the waters in the dream time. Crying out sharply. As the French ship breasted the vast interior Of the new land. America. A radio clicks on. The Arabs, A commentator is saying, require a heavy hand. Dancing.

When I ran, it rained. Late in the afternoon— midsummer, upstate New York, mornings I wrote, read Polish history, and there was a woman whom I thought about; outside the moody, humid American sublime—late in the afternoon, toward sundown, just as the sky was darkening, the light came up and redwings settled in the cattails. They were death's idea of twilight, the whole notes of a requiem the massed clouds croaked above the somber fields.Lady of eyelashes, do you hear me? Whiteness, otter's body, coolness of the morning, rubbed amber and the skin's salt, do you hear me? This is Poland speaking, “era of the dawn of freedom,” nineteen twenty-two.

New Year’s morning— everything is in blossom! I feel about average. A huge frog and I staring at each other, neither of us moves. This moth saw brightness in a woman’s chamber— burned to a crisp. Asked how old he was the boy in the new kimono stretched out all five fingers. Blossoms at night, like people moved by music Napped half the day; no one punished me! Fiftieth birthday: From now on, It’s all clear profit, every sky. Don’t worry, spiders, I keep house casually. These sea slugs, they just don’t seem Japanese. Hell: Bright autumn moon; pond snails crying in the saucepan.