another elaboration of desire

In the morning, after running along the river: 

'Creekstones practice the mild yoga of becoming smooth.' 

By afternoon I was thinking: once you're smooth, you're dead. 

'It is good sometimes that poetry should disenchant us,' 

I wrote, and something about 'the heart's huge vacancy,' 

which seemed contemptible. After dinner—sudden cooling 

of the summer air—I sat down to it. Where. 

---

Walking down to Heart's Desire beach in the summer evenings 

of the year my marriage ended— 

though I was hollowed out by pain, 

honeycombed with the emptiness of it, 

like the bird bones on the beach 

the salt of the bay water had worked on for a season—

such surprising lightness in the hand—

I don't think I could have told the pain of loss 

from the pain of possibility, 

though I knew they weren't the same thing. 

When I think of that time, I think mainly of the osprey's cry, 

a startled yelp, 

the cry more a color than a sound, and as if

it ripped the sky, was white,

as if it were scar tissue and fresh hurt at once.

Toyon, old oak, and coffeeberry: always about halfway,

but especially if the day had been hot, the scent of vanilla grass—

my throat so swollen with some unsortable mix

of sorrow and desire I couldn't swallow—

salt smell, grey water, sometimes the fog came in,

pouring down the dragonback of pines,

often there was one blue heron  in the tidal pond—

and I'd present my emptiness, which has huge, baffled

(Rilke writing in French because there was no German equivalent

for l'absence in 'the great positive sense'

with which it appeared in Valéry:

one of my minor occupations was raging against Rilke),

and most of the time I felt nothing,

when the moment came that was supposed to embody presence,

nothing really. There were a few buffleheads,

as usual, a few gulls rocking in the surf.

Sometimes a Western grebe diving and swimming

with its crazed red eye.

So there were these two emptiness: one made of pain and desire

and one made of vacancy.

(Paused for a moment in this writing and went out. 

Dark, first the dark. Wind in the trees. 

Everybody's private pain: in Korea once, in a mountain pass, 

a carved placatory shrine, a figure of a couple copulating, 

and underneath in hangul: we beget joy, we beget suffering. 

It made you want to say a prayer, to conjure prayer. 

Lost everything: this is the night; it doesn't love me
or not. 

Shadow of a hawk, then shadow of a hawk. 

Going down at about the speed of a second hand.) 

I thought of my mother ending her days in a hotel room, 

scarcely able to breathe.
"I'm doing fine 

except for the asthma.
" "It's emphysema, Mom." 

"We used to call it asthma. Anyway, I'm just lucky 

I have my health." Of my brother in the psych ward 

at San Francisco General, his ward-mate an eight-month's-pregnant 

girl, coming down, like him, from crack. 

When they were let out to smoke in a courtyard, 

some guy from another ward four stories up 

was pounding on the window. She thought he was trying 

to get her attention. A shy, pleased smile (gap in her bad front teeth). 

And said to me, coyly,
"Fatal attraction." 

When he got the window open, it turned out 

he wanted the orderly, also smoking. He needed insulin. 

My brother on crack, spoken with a stutter:
"The really crazy jones 

lasts about two hours and when you come down, 

you really (r-r-r-really) come down. You got nothing left 

but the lint in your pockets." 

                                                Emptinesses—

one is desire, another is the object that it doesn't have. 

Everything real nourished in the space between these things. 

There ought to be some single word for the misery of divorce. 

(What is the rhythm of that line? Oh, I see. Four and three, 

Emily's line!—

                There ought to be some single word 

                For the misery of divorce. 

                It dines upon you casually 

                duh-dduh-duh-duh-dduh-fierce/remorse/pierce/) 

In Berkeley over dinner in a restaurant on a Friday night, 

I noticed that it was full of fathers with daughters, 

mothers with sons. Some of them people I knew or recognized. 

The manager of the bookstore, the woman who sold antiques. 

These were the stunned, out-of-the-house, non-cooking parents 

in their new apartments who had the children weekends, 

while their mates, resuming the unaccustomed ritual of dating, 

were out with the new lover. Children, I guess, make of this 

what they have to. I looked around. Kids staring at their plates, 

parents studying them anxiously, saying,
"So, how was school?" 

The whole theater of the real: sadness, which seems infinite, 

cruelty, which seems infinite, the cheerful one-armed guy 

in the bakery mornings—he puts his croissant between his teeth 

and pours himself some coffee; someone on the phone 

trying to get me to pay my brother's rent,
"I got too big a heart, 

I try to run a clean place"—the first floor reserved 

for transvestite hookers wobbling on spiked heels— 

and who would deny their clients the secret exhaustion 

of their dreams?; the whole botched world—that funny phrase 

I'd heard yesterday, someone talking about a failing baseball team: 

'they really screw the pooch.' And the pelicans 

that settled in the cove in the late midsummer dusk, 

preposterous creatures, they seem companionable, 

finding each other as the dark came on. I would go home, 

make tea, call my children, some piece of writing 

that I'd started would seem possible. 

                                                            Odd how families 

live in houses. At first a lot marked out with string. 

Then levels, rooms, that lift it off the ground, 

arrange it, and then inside that intricate dance 

of need and habit and routine. Children's crayon drawings 

on the wall. Messages on the refrigerator. Or altars 

for the household gods. At night the dreaming bodies, 

little gene pool echoes passing back and forth among them, 

earlobe, the lap of an eyelid, and the dreams. 

Under sorrow, what? I'd think. Under 

the animal sense of loss? 

                                        Climbing in Korea, 

months later, coming to the cave of the Sokkaram Buddha—

a view down a forested ravine to the Sea of Japan—

perhaps a glimpse: the closed eyelids—you'd have to make a gesture 

with your hand to get the fineness of the gesture in the stone—

the stone hands resting on the thighs, open, utterly composed. 

Cool inside. Dark. The stone, though there was no lighting, 

seemed to glow. It seemed I could leave every internal fury there 

and walk away. In the calm I felt like a wind-up monkey. 

Like I had always been a wind-up monkey, and that, 

if I knew the gesture (going outside? picking the petals 

of the wildflowers—there was something like a thimbleberry bush—

everything was 'like' something I knew—on the path 

from the monastery—so I seemed to be walking 

in a parallel universe, peopled by unfamiliar bird song, 

and ancient trail dust, and the forest's dappled light— 

papery flowers, very plain ancestor of the garden rose—

another elaboration of desire—of a startling magenta-blue; 

I thought I might pick them, bring them in, 

and drop them before the—what—the Buddha— 

the carved, massive stone, the—) 

Also thought I could leave my wedding ring. And didn't do it. 

In the months we were apart, I had endless fantasies 

about when I'd finally take it off and how. And then one day, 

I was moving, lugging cardboard boxes, I looked down 

and it wasn't there. I looked in the grass of the driveway strip. 

Sowbugs, an earwig. So strange. This was a time when, 

in the universities, everyone was reading Derrida. 

Who'd set out to write a dissertation about time; 

he read Heidegger, Husserl, Kant, Augustine, and found 

that there was no place to stand from which to talk about it. 

There was no ground. It was language. The scandal 

of nothingness! Put cheerfully to work by my colleagues 

to dismantle regnant ideologies. It was a time when, 

a few miles away, kids were starting to kill each other 

in wars over turf for selling drugs, schizophrenics 

with matted hair, dazed eyes, festering feet, always engaged 

in some furious volleying inner dialogue they neglected, 

unlike the rest of us, to hide, were beginning to fill the streets, 

'de-institutionalized,' in someone's idea of reform, 

and I was searching in the rosebed of a rented house 

inch by inch, looking under the carseat where the paper clips 

and Roosevelt dimes and unresolved scum-shapes of once 

vegetal stuff accumulate in abject little villages 

where matter hides while it transforms itself. Nothing there. 

I never found it. 

                            Looking at old frescoes 

from medieval churches in The Cloisters once, I wondered it, 

all over Europe, there were not corresponding vacancies, 

sheer blanks where pitas and martyrdoms of Santa Lucia 

and crowing cocks rising to announce the dawn in which 

St. Peter had betrayed his lord in sandstone and basalt 

and carnelian marble once had been. This emptiness 

felt like that. Under the hosannahs and the terror of the plague 

and the crowning of the Virgin in the spring. 

I didn't leave my ring. Apparently I was supposed to wait 

until it disappeared. I didn't know what else, exactly, 

I could leave. 

                        In Seoul, in Myongdong, in a teeming alley, 

there was a restaurant where the fish was so fresh 

they let you know it by beginning each meal 

with a small serving of the tips of the tentacles 

of octopus, just cut, writhing on a plate. 

In the latticed entrance, perch glowing like pearls 

in the lamplight thrown from doorways 

as they circulated, wide-eyed and moony, in the tanks, 

coppery lobsters scuttling over lobsters, 

squid like the looseness in a dream. Had been at a meeting 

all day on the conditions of imprisoned writers. 

This one without paper and pen for several years. 

This one with blood in his urine. 

                                                    In small cells 

all over the world, I found myself thinking, 

walking through the market place—apple-pears 

and nectarines in great piles, wavery under swinging lamps, 

as if you could sell the sunrise—torturers upholding 

the order of the state. Under screams order, and under that—

it must be the torturer's nightmare—nothing. 

                                                                        Smoothness 

of the stone at Sokkaram. The way the contours, flowing, 

were weightless and massive at once. I said to myself 

there was kindness in the Buddha's hands, but there wasn't kindness 

in the hands. They made the idea of kindness 

seem—not a delusion exactly, or a joke. They smoothed 

the idea away the way you'd stroke a nervous or a frightened dog. 

(Outside again. Rubbing my eyes. Deep night, brilliant stars. 

I never thought I'd write about this subject. Was tired of 

    'subjects.' 

Mallarmé on music: the great thing is that it can resolve an 

    argument 

without ever stating the terms. But thought I'd ride this rhythm 

    out, 

this somewhat tired, subdued voice—like Landor's
"Carlino," 

    perhaps—

a poet-guide!—and see where it was going.) 

                                                                        Around that time— 

find the neutral distance in which to say this—

a woman came into my life. What I felt was delight. 

When she came into the room, I smiled. The gift was 

that there didn't need to be passionate yearning across distances. 

One night—before or after Sokkaram?—when we had made love 

and made love, desperate kissings, wells of laughter, 

in a monkish apartment on the wooden floor, we went outside, 

naked in the middle of the night. There must have been a full moon. 

There was a thick old shadowy deodar cedar by my door 

and the cones were glowing, lustrously glowing, 

and we thought, both of us, our happiness had lit the tree up. 

The word that occurs to me is 'droll.' It seemed sublimely droll. 

The way we were as free as children playing hide and seek. 

Her talk—raffish, funny, unexpected, sometimes wise, darkened—

the way a black thing is scintillant in light—by irony. 

The way neither of us needed to hold back, think 

before we spoke, lie, tiptoe carefully around a given subject, 

or brace ourselves to say hard truths. It felt to me hilarious, 

and hilarity, springwater gushing up from some muse's font 

of crystal in old poems, seemed a form of emptiness. Look! 

(Rilke in the sonnets) I last but a minute. I walk on nothing. 

Coming and going I do this dance in air. At night 

when we had got too tired to talk, were touching all along our bodies, 

nodding off, I'd fall asleep smiling. Mornings—for how long—

I'd wake in pain. Physical pain, fluid; it moved 

through my body like a grassfire spreading on a hill. 

(Opposite of touching). I'd think of my wife, her lover, 

some moment in our children's lives, the gleam of old wood 

on a Welsh cabinet we'd agonized over buying, 

put against one wall, then another till it found its place. 

This—old word!—riding that we made, its customs, villages, 

    demesnes. 

would torture me awhile. If she were there, rare mornings 

that she was—we did a lot of car keys, hurried dressing, last kisses 

on swollen lips at 2 AM—I'd turn to her, stare at her sleeping face 

and want to laugh from happiness. I'd even think: ten years 

from now we could be screaming at each other in a kitchen, 

and want to laugh. My legs and chest still felt as if 

someone had been beating them with sticks. I could hardly move. 

I'd quote Vallejo to myself: 'Golpes como del odio de Dios'; 

I'd stare at the ceiling, bewildered, and feel a grief 

so old it could have been some beggar woman in a fairy tale. 

I didn't know you could lie down in such swift, opposing currents. 

                                    Also two emptinesses, I suppose, the one 

joy comes from, the one regret, disfigured intention, the longing 

to be safe or whole flows into when it's disappearing. 

I'd gone out of the cave. Looked at the scaled brightness 

of the sea ten miles away; looked at unfamiliar plants. 

During the war, a botanist in Pusan had told me, 

a number of native species had become extinct. People 

in the countryside boiled anything that grew to make a soup. 

We had 'spring hunger,' he said, like medieval peasants. 

There's even a word for it in ancient Korean. Back inside, 

in the cool darkness carved with bodhisattvas, 

I presented myself once more for some revelation. 

Nothing. Great calm, flowing stone. No sorrow, no not-sorrow. 

Lotuses, carved in the pediment, simple, fleshy, open. 

Private pain is easy, in a way. It doesn't go away, 

but you can teach yourself to see its size. Invent a ritual. 

Walk up a mountain in the afternoon, gather up pine twigs. 

Light a fire, thin smoke, not an ambitious fire, 

and sit before it and watch it till it burns to ash 

and the last gleam is gone from it, and dark falls. 

Then you get up, brush yourself off, and walk back to the world.

If you're lucky, you're hungry. 

                                                In the town center 

of Kwangju, there was a late October market fair. 

Some guy was barbecuing halfs of baby chicks on a long, sooty 

    contraption 

of a grill, slathering them with soy sauce. Baby chicks. 

Corn pancakes stuffed with leeks and garlic. Some milky, 

violent, sweet Korean barley wine or beer. Families strolling. 

Booths hawking calculators, sox, dolls to ward off evil, 

and computer games. Everywhere, of course, it was Korea, 

people arguing politics, red-faced, women serving men. 

I thought in this flesh-and-charcoal-scented heavy air 

of the Buddha in his cave. Tired as if from making love 

or writing through the night. Was I going to eat a baby chick? 

Two pancakes. A clay mug of the beer. Sat down 

under an umbrella and looked to see, among the diners 

feasting, quarreling about their riven country, 

if you were supposed to eat the bones. You were. I did.

[Robert Hass {1941- } 'Regalia for a Black Hat Dancer', from Sun Under Wood]