by Robert Hass
Robert Hass
The Apple Trees at Olema
New and Selected Poems
For Brenda
Contents
New Poems
July Notebook: The Birds
Sleep like the down elevator’s
In front of me six African men, each of them tall
They are built like exclamation points, woodpeckers.
Are you there? It’s summer. Are you smeared with the juice of cherries?
After Coleridge and for Milosz: Late July
For C.R.: What do you mean you have nothing?
Late afternoons in June the fog rides in
August Notebook: A Death
1. River Bicycle Peony
2. Sudden and Grateful Memory of Mississippi John Hurt
3. You can fall a long way in sunlight
4. Today his body is consigned to the flames
Variations on a Passage in Edward Abbey
The Bus to Baekdam Temple
Song of the Border Guard
September Notebook: Stories
Everyone comes from a long way off
Driving up 80 in the haze, they talked and talked.
Alternatively:
He found that it was no good trying to tell
Names for involuntary movements of the body—
The receptionist at the hospital morgue told him
Setup without the punchline:
Once there were two sisters called Knock Me and Sock Me;
“Why?” he asked. “Because she was lonely,
It is good to sit down to birthday cake
Stories about the distribution of wealth:
How Eldie Got Her Name
Punchline without the setup:
He had known, as long as he’d known anything,
Because she, not her sister, answered the door,
A Ballad:
She looked beautiful, and looked her age, too.
Two jokes walk into a bar.
In the other world the girls were named Eleanor and Filina,
Some of David’s Story
Snowy Egret
The Red Chinese Dragon and the Shadows on Her Body in the Moonlight
From Field Guide
On the Coast near Sausalito
Fall
Maps
Adhesive: For Earlene
Bookbuying in the Tenderloin
Spring
Song
Palo Alto: The Marshes
Concerning the Afterlife, the Indians of Central California Had Only the Dimmest Notions
The Nineteenth Century as a Song
Measure
Applications of the Doctrine
House
In Weather
From Praise
Heroic Simile
Meditation at Lagunitas
Sunrise
The Yellow Bicycle
Against Botticelli
Like Three Fair Branches from One Root Deriv’d
Transparent Garments
The Image
The Feast
The Pure Ones
The Garden of Delight
Santa Lucia
To a Reader
The Origin of Cities
Winter Morning in Charlottesville
Old Dominion
Monticello
Emblems of a Prior Order
Weed
Child Naming Flowers
Picking Blackberries with a Friend Who Has Been Reading Jacques Lacan
The Beginning of September
Not Going to New York: A Letter
Songs to Survive the Summer
From Human Wishes
Spring Drawing
Vintage
Spring Rain
Late Spring
Rusia en 1931
Spring Drawing 2
Calm
Museum
Novella
Churchyard
Conversion
Human Wishes
Tall Windows
The Harbor at Seattle
Paschal Lamb
Duck Blind
Quartet
A Story About the Body
In the Bahamas
January
The Apple Trees at Olema
Misery and Splendor
Santa Lucia II
Cuttings
Santa Barbara Road
Berkeley Eclogue
Privilege of Being
Natural Theology
Tahoe in August
Thin Air
Between the Wars
On Squaw Peak
From Sun Under Wood
Happiness
Our Lady of the Snows
Dragonflies Mating
My Mother’s Nipples
The Gardens of Warsaw
Layover
Notes on “Layover”
The Woods in New Jersey
Iowa City: Early April
A Note on “Iowa City: Early April”
Sonnet
Faint Music
Forty Something
Shame: An Aria
Regalia for a Black Hat Dancer
Jatun Sacha
Frida Kahlo: In the Saliva
English: An Ode
The Seventh Night
Interrupted Meditation
From Time and Materials
Iowa, January
After Trakl
Envy of Other People’s Poems
A Supple Wreath of Myrtle
Futures in Lilacs
Three Dawn Songs in Summer
The Distribution of Happiness
Etymology
The Problem of Describing Color
The Problem of Describing Trees
Winged and Acid Dark
A Swarm of Dawns, a Flock of Restless Noons
Breach and Orison
The World as Will and Representation
After the Winds
For Czesław Miłosz in Kraków
Time and Materials
Art and Life
Domestic Interiors
Twin Dolphins
Then Time
That Music
Czesław Miłosz: In Memoriam
Horace: Three Imitations
State of the Planet
Poem with a Cucumber in It
Drift and Vapor (Surf Faintly)
“…White of Forgetfulness, White of Safety”
I Am Your Waiter Tonight and My Name Is Dmitri
A Poem
Bush’s War
Pears
The Dry Mountain Air
First Things at the Last Minute
Poet’s Work
Mouth Slightly Open
Old Movie with the Sound Turned Off
Ezra Pound’s Proposition
On Visiting the DMZ at Panmunjon: A Haibun
Consciousness
Exit, Pursued by a Sierra Meadow
September, Inverness
Notes and Acknowledgments
About the Author
Other Books by Robert Hass
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
New Poems
JULY NOTEBOOK: THE BIRDS
Sleep like the down elevator’s
imitation of a memory lapse.
Then early light.
Why were you born, voyager?
one is not born for a reason,
though there is a skein of causes.
out of yellowish froth,
cells began to divide, or so they say,
and feed on sunlight,
for no reason.
After that life wanted life.
You are awake now?
I am awake now.
and handsome, all of them impeccably tailored;
all six ordered Coca-Cola at dinner (Muslim,
it seems, a trade delegation? diplomats?);
the young American girl next to me
is a veterinary assistant from DC;
I asked her if she kept records
or held animals. A little of both,
she says. She ’s on her way to Stockholm.
The young man in the window seat, also American,
black hair not combed any time
in recent memory, expensive Italian shirt,
gold crucifix fastened to his earlobe,
scarab tattooed in the soft skin
between thumb and forefinger of his left hand,
is reading a Portuguese phrasebook.
A lover perhaps in Lisbon or Faro.
There should be a phrase for this passenger tenderness,
the flickering perceptions like the whitecaps
later on the Neva, when the wind
off the Gulf of Finland, roughens the surface
of the river and spills the small petals
of white lilacs on the gray stone
of the embankment. Above it two black-faced gulls,
tilted in the air, cry out sharply, and sharply.
They are built like exclamation points, woodpeckers.
Are you there? It’s summer. Are you smeared with the juice of cherries?
The light this morning is touching everything,
the grasses by the pond,
and the wind-chivvied water,
and the aspens on the bank, and the one white fir on its sunward side,
and the blue house down the road
and its white banisters which are glowing on top
and shadowy on the underside,
which intensifies the luster of the surfaces that face the sun
as it does to the leaves of the aspen.
Are you there? Maybe it would be best
to be the shadow side of a pine needle
on a midsummer morning
(to be in imagination and for a while
on a midsummer morning
the shadow side of a pine needle).
The sun has concentrated to a glowing point
in the unlit bulb of the porchlight on the porch
of the blue house down the road.
It almost hurts to look at it.
Are you there? Are you soaked in dreams still?
The sky is inventing a Web site called newest azure.
There are four kinds of birdsong outside
and a methodical early morning saw.
No, not a saw. It’s a boy on a scooter and the sun
on his black helmet is concentrated to a point of glowing light.
He isn’t death come to get us
and he isn’t truth arriving in a black T-shirt
chevroned up the arms in tongues of flame.
Are you there? For some reason I’m imagining
the small hairs on your neck, even though I know
you are dread and the muse
and my mortal fate and a secret.
It’s a boy on a scooter on a summer morning.
Did I say the light was touching everything?
After Coleridge and for Milosz: Late July
I didn’t go hiking with the others this morning
on the dusty trail past the firehouse,
past the massive, asymmetrical, vanilla-scented
Jeffrey pine, among the spikes of buckbrush
and the spicy sage and the gray-green ceanothus,
listening to David’s descriptions of the terrifying
efficiencies of a high mountain ecosystem,
the white fir’s cost-benefit analysis
of the usefulness of its lower limbs,
the ants herding aphids—they store the sugars
in the aphid’s rich excretions—on the soft green
mesas of a mule ear leaf. I think of the old man’s
dark study jammed with books in seven languages
as the headquarters of his military campaign
against nothingness. Immense egoism in it,
of course, the narcissism of a wound,
but actual making, actual work. one of the things
he believed was that our poems could be better
than our motives. So who cares why
he wrote those lines about the hairstyle
of his piano teacher in Wilno in the 1920s
or the building with spumy baroque cornices
that collapsed on her in 1942. David and the others
would by now have reached the waterfall.
There were things he could not have known
as he sat beside her on the mahogany bench,
that he could only have seen, or recomposed,
remembering the smell of her powder,
as a sixty-five-year-old man on another continent.
Looking out a small window at an early spring rain:
that, if she taught piano, she was an artistic girl,
that she didn’t have family money, that she must have
dreamed once of performing and discovered
the limits of her gift and that her hair,
piled atop her head and, thickly braided,
wound about her beautifully shaped skull
(which the boy with his worn sheaf of Chopin études
would hardly have noticed) was formed
by some bohemian elegance and raffishness
in the style of her music-student youth, so that he,
the poet at the outer edges of middle age,
with what comes after that visible before him
could think unbidden of her reddish Belle Epoque hair
and its powdery faint odor of apricot
that he had not noticed and of the hours
she must have spent, thousands in a lifetime,
tending to her braids, and think that the young,
himself then with his duties and resentments,
are always walking past some already perished
dream of stylishness or beauty that survives
or half-survives in the familiar and therefore tedious,
therefore anonymous, outfitting of one ’s elders,
and that her gentility would have required
(the rain in green California may have let up
a little and quieted to dripping in the ferns)
the smallest rooms in the most expensive quarter
of the city she could manage—he’d have recalled
then rows of yellow bindings of French novels
on her well-dusted shelves—and this was why
he visited her in that gleaming parlor room
on the Street of St. Peter of the Rock, and why,
he would hear years later in a letter
from a classmate, the stone that crushed her
was not concrete or the local limestone,
but pure chunks of white, carefully quarried
Carerra marble. Something in him identified,
must have, with the darkness he thought
he was contending against. A child practicing
holding its breath, as a form of power,
a threat (but against whom? To extort
what?). or a lover perfecting a version
of the silent treatment from some strategy
of anticipatory anger at the failure of love.
So he may have had to rouse himself
against the waste, against the vast stupidity
and cruelty and waste and wasted pathos,
to hear the music in which to say that he ’d noticed,
after all the years, that her small body