by Robert Hass
A STORY ABOUT THE BODY
The young composer, working that summer at an artist’s colony, had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she made amused and considered answers to his questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she turned to him and said, “I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you that I have had a double mastectomy,” and when he didn’t understand, “I’ve lost both my breasts.” The radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity—like music—withered very quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, “I’m sorry. I don’t think I could.” He walked back to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the bowl—she must have swept them from the corners of her studio—was full of dead bees.
IN THE BAHAMAS
The doctor looked at her stitches thoughtfully. A tall lean white man with an English manner. “Have you ever watched your mum sew?” he asked. “The fellow who did this hadn’t. I like to take a tuck on the last stitch. That way the skin doesn’t bunch up on the ends. Of course, you can’t see the difference, but you can feel it.” Later she asked him about all the one-armed and one-legged black men she kept seeing in the street. “Diabetic gangrene, mostly. There really isn’t more of it here than in your country, but there’s less prosthesis. It’s expensive, of course. And stumps are rather less of a shock when you come right down to it. Well, as we say, there’s nothing colorful about the Caribbean.” He tapped each black thread into a silver basin as he plucked it out. “Have you ever been to Haiti? Now there is a truly appalling place.”
JANUARY
Three clear days
and then a sudden storm—
the waxwings, having
feasted on the pyracantha,
perch in the yard
on an upended pine, and face
into the slanting rain.
I think they are a little drunk.
I was making this gathering—which pleased me, the waxwings that always pass through at this time of year, the discarded Christmas tree they perched in, and the first January storm, as if I had finally defined a California season—when Rachel came down the walk and went into the house. I typed out the poem—the birds giddy with Janus, the two-faced god—and then went in to say hello.
Two women sitting at a kitchen table
Muted light on a rainy morning
one has car keys in her hand
I was surprised by two feelings at once; one was a memory, the other a memory trace. The memory, called up, I think, by a glimpse of Rachel’s sculpted profile against the cypresses outside the kitchen window just before she turned to greet me: I thought of a day twelve years ago in early summer. Rachel had just had an abortion and we all went for a walk in San Francisco near the bay. Everything was in bloom and we were being conscientiously cheerful, young really, not knowing what form there might be for such an occasion or, in fact, what occasion it was. And Rachel, in profile, talking casually, the bay behind her, looked radiant with grief. The memory trace had to do with car keys and two women in a kitchen. Someone was visiting my mother. It was a rainy day so I was inside. Her friend, as adults will, to signal that they are not going to take too much of your time, had car keys in her hand. Between Earlene and Rachel, there were three oranges in a basket on a table and I had the sweet, dizzying sensation that the color was circulating among them in a dance.
Sing the hymeneal slow.
Lovers have a way to go,
their lightest bones will have to grow
more heavy in uneasy heat.
The heart is what we eat
with almond blossoms bitter to the tongue,
the hair of tulips
in the softening spring.
Rachel is looking for a house. A realtor had just shown her one. Looking at the new house, she loved the old one, especially the green of the garden, looking out on the garden. The old house has drawbacks, long rehearsed, and the new one, with its cedar shingle, exposed beams, view, doesn’t feel right, it is so anonymous and perfect; it doesn’t have the green secrecy of the garden or the apple tree to tie Lucia’s swing to. Earlene is asking questions, trying to help. A few minutes later, when I pass through again, they are laughing. At the comedy in the business of trying to sort through mutually exclusive alternatives in which figures some tacit imagination of contentment, some invisible symbolizing need from which life wants to flower. “I hate that old house,” Rachel is saying, laughing, tears in her eyes. But that is not mainly what I notice; I find myself looking at the women’s skin, the coloring and the first relaxation of the tautness of the sleeker skin of the young, the casual beauty and formality of that first softening.
Back at my desk: no birds, no rain,
but light—the white of Shasta daisies,
and two red geraniums against the fence,
and the dark brown of wet wood,
glistening a little as it dries.
THE APPLE TREES AT OLEMA
They are walking in the woods along the coast
and in a grassy meadow, wasting, they come upon
two old neglected apple trees. Moss thickened
every bough and the wood of the limbs looked rotten
but the trees were wild with blossom and a green fire
of small new leaves flickered even on the deadest branches.
Blue-eyes, poppies, a scattering of lupine
flecked the meadow, and an intricate, leopard-spotted
leaf-green flower whose name they didn’t know.
Trout lily, he said; she said, adder’s-tongue.
She is shaken by the raw, white, backlit flaring
of the apple blossoms. He is exultant,
as if something he felt were verified,
and looks to her to mirror his response.
If it is afternoon, a thin moon of my own dismay
fades like a scar in the sky to the east of them.
He could be knocking wildly at a closed door
in a dream. She thinks, meanwhile, that moss
resembles seaweed drying lightly on a dock.
Torn flesh, it was the repetitive torn flesh
of appetite in the cold white blossoms
that had startled her. Now they seem tender
and where she was repelled she takes the measure
of the trees and lets them in. But he no longer
has the apple trees. This is as sad or happy
as the tide, going out or coming in, at sunset.
The light catching in the spray that spumes up
on the reef is the color of the lesser finch
they notice now flashing dull gold in the light
above the field. They admire the bird together,
it draws them closer, and they start to walk again.
A small boy wanders corridors of a hotel that way.
Behind one door, a maid. Behind another one, a man
in striped pajamas shaving. He holds the number
of his room close to the center of his mind
gravely and delicately, as if it were the key,
and then he wanders among strangers all he wants.
MISERY AND SPLENDOR
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.
SANTA LUCIA II
Pleasure is so hard to remember. It goes
so quick from the mind. That day in third grade,
I thought I heard the teacher say the ones
who finished the assignment could go home.
I had a new yellow rubber raincoat
with a hat, blue galoshes; I put them on,
took my lunch pail and my books and started
for the door. The whole class giggled. Somehow
I had misheard. “Where are you going?”
the teacher said. The kids all roared. I froze.
In yellow rubber like a bathtub toy.
That memory comes when I call, vivid,
large and embarrassing like the helpless
doglike fidelity of my affections,
and I flush each time. But the famous night
we first made love, I think I remember
stars, that the moon was watery and pale.
It always circles back to being seen.
Psyche in the dark, Psyche in the daylight
counting seed. We go to the place where words
aren’t and we die, suffer resurrection
two by two. Some men sleep, some read, some
want chocolate in the middle of the night.
They look at you adoring and you wonder
what it is they think they see. Themselves
transformed, adored. oh, it makes me tired
and it doesn’t work. on the floor in the sunlight
he looked sweet. Laughing, hair tangled, he said
I was all he wanted. If he were all I
wanted, he ’d be life. I saw from the window
Mrs. Piombo in the backyard, planting phlox
in her immaculate parable of a garden.
She wears her black sweater under the cypress
in the sun. Life fits her like a glove,
she doesn’t seem to think it’s very much.
Near Point Sur Lighthouse, morning, dunes
of white sand the eelgrass holds in place.
I saw at a distance what looked like feet
lifted in the air. I was on the reef,
I thought I was alone in all the silence,
poking anemones, watching turban snails
slide across the brown kelp in tidal pools.
And then I saw them. It was all I saw—
a pair of ankles; lifted, tentative.
They twitched like eyelids, like a nerve jumping
in the soft flesh of the arm. My crotch throbbed
and my throat went dry. Absurd. Pico Blanco
in the distance and the summer heat steady
as a hand. I wanted to be touched
and didn’t want to want it. And by whom?
The sea foamed easily around the rocks
like the pathos of every summer. In the pools
anemones, cream-colored, little womb-mouths,
oldest animal with its one job to do
I carry as a mystery inside
or else it carries me around it, petals
to its stamen. And then I heard her cry.
Sharp, brief, a gull’s hunger bleeding off the wind.
A sound like anguish. Driving up the coast—
succulents ablaze on the embankments,
morning glory on the freeway roadcuts
where the rifles crackled at the army base—
I thought that life was hunger moving and
that hunger was a form of suffering.
The drive from the country to the city
was the distance from solitude to wanting,
or to union, or to something else—the city
with its hills and ill-lit streets, a vast
dull throb of light, dimming the night sky.
What a funny place to center longing,
in a stranger. All I have to do is reach
down once and touch his cheek and the long fall
from paradise begins. The dream in which
I’m stuck and Father comes to help but then
takes off his mask, the one in which shit, oozing
from a wound, forms delicate rosettes, the dream
in which my book is finished and my shoulders
start to sprout a pelt of hair, or the woman
in the sari, prone, covered with menstrual
blood, her arms raised in supplication.
We take that into the dark. Sex is peace
because it’s so specific. And metaphors:
live milk, blond hills, blood singing,
hilarity that comes and goes like rain,
you got me coffee, I’ll get you your book,
something to sleep beside, with, against.
The morning light comes up, and their voices
through the wall, the matter-of-fact chatter
of the child dawdling at breakfast, a clink
of spoons. It’s in small tasks the mirrors
disappear, the old woman already
gone shopping. Her apricot, pruned yesterday,
is bare. To be used up like that. Psyche
punished for her candle in the dark.
oil painting is a form of ownership.
The essay writer who was here last year,
at someone’s party, a heavy man with glasses,
Persian cat. Art since the Renaissance
is ownership. I should get down to work.
You and the task—the third that makes a circle
is the imagined end. You notice rhythms
washing over you, opening and closing,
they are the world, inside you, and you work.
CUTTINGS
Body Through Which the Dream Flows
You count up everything you have
or have let go.
What’s left is the lost and the possible.
To the lost, the irretrievable
or just out of reach, you say:
light loved the pier, the seedy
string quartet of the sun going down over water
that gilds ants and beach fleas
ecstatic and communal on the stiffened body
of a dead grebe washed ashore
by last night’s storm. Idiot sorrow,
an irregular splendor, is the half sister
of these considerations.
To the possible you say nothing.
October on the planet.
Huge moon, bright stars.
The lovers Undressing
They put on rising, and they rose.
They put on falling, and they fell.
They were the long grass on the hillside
that shudders in the wind. They sleep.
Days, kitchens. Cut flowers,
shed petals, smell of lemon, smell of toast
or soap. Are you upset about something,
one says. No, the other says.
Are you sure, the one says.
Yes, the other says, I’m sure.
Sad
often we are sad animals.
Bored dogs, monkeys getting rained on.
Migration
of the climbing rose. April:
last rain, the first dazzle
and reluctance of the light.
Dark
Desire lies down with the day
and the night birds wake
to their fast heartbeats
in the trees. The woman beside you
is breathing evenly. All day
you were in a body. Now
you are in a skull. Wind,
streetlights, trees flicker
on the ceiling in the dark.
Things Change
Small song,
two beat:
the robin on the lawn
hops from sun
into shadow, shadow
into sun.
Stories in Bed
In the field behind her house, she said,