#robert hass

[silk-and-blade]

“Are you there? Are you soaked in dreams still…? Did I say the light was touching everything?”

— Robert Hass.

[reverie-quotes]

Small stars, and blind the hunger under sun, we turn to each other and turn to each other in the mother air of what we want.

— Robert Hass, "Sunrise," Praise

[firstfullmoon]

Robert Hass, from “Iowa City: Early April”

[gustaving]

Excerpt from “Meditation at Lagunitas,” by Robert Hass

[contremineur]

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.

Robert Hass, Sonnet

from here

Karl Blossfeldt, from here

[a-ramblinrose]

- Robert Hass, Sun Under Wood

[eternal--returned]

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 and I. There was a woman I made love to and I remembered how, holding her small shoulders in my hands sometimes, I felt a violent wonder at her presence like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat, muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her. Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances. I must have been the same to her. But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread, the thing her father said that hurt her, what she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous as words, days that are the good flesh continuing. Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

Robert Hass ֍ Meditation at Lagunitas (1979)

[havingapoemwithyou]

meditation Lagunitas by Robert Hass

[derangedrhythms]

Robert Hass, Human Wishes; from ‘Privilege of Being’ (edited excerpt)

[headlightsforever]

I am behind a funeral cortege on a mountain road And decide to pass it, but it seems to go on forever And I'm completely exposed in the oncoming lane And the only way out is to merge into the caravan Of mourners. It is getting dark and a thick snow Begins to fall in a sudden flurry and then stops Abruptly, which gives the world an expectant air, Though, really, nothing in particular happens After a snowfall, except for the intense stillness In the pine forest the road is winding through.

Robert Hass, “Dream in the Summer of my Seventy-Third Year”

[rakonteur]

Longing we say because desire is full of endless distances

Robert Hass (Meditation at Lagunitas)

[deadbutbetter]

[reverie-quotes]

We are the song death takes its own time singing. It calls us as I call you child

— Robert Hass, "Songs to Survive the Summer,"

[veryslowreader]

Praise by Robert Hass

Wildflowers

[gustaving]

“Meditation at Lagunitas,” by Robert Hass

[haveyoureadthispoem-poll]

"Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, / saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry."

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