Now & Then, page 18
like someone knocking at the temple—arriving
within each soul growing old
begging, impatient
for those nights to end, wanting
never darkness—
its murmurous mirror:
*
Now&Then_Interior_REV5.indd 145
3/20/07 2:27:23 PM
* * *
146 Robert Hass / 1999
its drained tongue
as dead driftwood soaking the vein
as these words float up
out of body
in a joke sharpened in or sharpening
each myopic minute
met
and now dirtied up, or far too beautiful
for this
and now desperate for
the never would or could
or at least had not meant to mean). Pity the stirred.
So stormed out, as in exhausted, my eardrums left watching.
Each nerve, in the mood exhumed,
hissing, go away,
go away, night sky, did we come this far together?
I am cold. And in this next breath,
the same waking,
the same hauling of debris. I am
here in the skin of . . . otherwise) shoveling out, dryly
march 28
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Gerard Manley Hopkins, an English Jesuit priest of the Victorian era who
spent much of his adult life in Ireland, is one of the great religious poets
in the English language. He is also—a somewhat different thing—a poet
Now&Then_Interior_REV5.indd 146
3/20/07 2:27:23 PM
* * *
1999 / Now & Then 147
of enormous spiritual intensity. Here are two of his best known poems,
one of them full of joy, the other full of terrible suffering. They are both
sonnets—though they burst the seams of that form; he gave them no
titles. You can find them in the Penguin edition of The Poems of Gerard
Manley Hopkins:
[As kingfishers catch fire . . . ]
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying, Whát I do is me: for that I came.
Í say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Chríst. For Chríst plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
[I wake and feel the fell . . . ]
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.
With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.
I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Now&Then_Interior_REV5.indd 147
3/20/07 2:27:23 PM
* * *
148 Robert Hass / 1999
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.
I once heard someone describe spirituality as “the vertical longings of
the soul.” I liked the definition; it brought to mind a shaft of cathedral
sunlight or the soaring lift of a classic spiritual. But I also didn’t like it
because the conventional idea of heaven is up above. Religion is always a
collective enterprise—a religion is communal worship centered on shared
ideas of the sacred. Spirituality is always more individual. It has to do with
the individual soul’s struggle with its own meaning; it can even take the
form of resistance to religion. Hopkins was certainly a religious poet. He
submitted his work to his spiritual superiors and was in that way a faith-
ful servant of his church. But, as these poems show, his spirituality was
his own; he struggled with meaning on his own terms. In the first poem
the soul’s longings find a place on earth, or, in a flash of delight, he wants
them to; in the other poem, they can’t. In both—and this is what makes
him such a remarkable poet—he wrings language out to speak the being
that dwells, as he says, “indoors each one” of us.
april 4
Easter: Charles Wright
Here is a poem for Easter. It comes from Charles Wright’s most recent
book, Appalachia (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). It’s the third and final volume
in his trilogy of suites of meditative poems that began with Chickamauga
and Black Zodiac, which received the Pulitzer Prize in 1997.
Wright lives in Charlottesville, Virginia. In this poem it’s the year
of the Hale-Bopp comet, end of winter, light is coming over the Blue
Ridge, and the poet is thinking about writing and about the idea of res-
urrection. And he takes his title from a great, funny, rueful line in a Bob
Dylan song:
Now&Then_Interior_REV5.indd 148
3/20/07 2:27:23 PM
* * *
1999 / Now & Then 149
“When You’re Lost in Juarez, in the Rain,
and It’s Easter Time Too”
Like a grain of sand added to time,
Like an inch of air added to space,
or a half-inch,
We scribble our little sentences.
Some of them sound okay and some of them sound not so okay.
A grain and an inch, a grain and an inch and a half.
Sad word wands, desperate alphabet.
Still, there’s no alternative
Since language fell from the sky.
Though mystics have always said that communication is
languageless.
And maybe they’re right—
the soul speaks and the soul receives.
Small room for rebuttal there . . .
Over the Blue Ridge, late March late light annunciatory
and visitational.
Tonight the comet Hale-Bopp
will ghost up on the dark page of the sky
By its secret juice and design from the full moon’s heat.
Tonight, some miracle will happen somewhere, it always does.
Good Friday’s a hard rain that won’t fall,
Wild onion and clump grass, green on green.
Our mouths are incapable, white violets cover the earth.
You can feel the airiness of his style in this poem, the lightness. Wright’s
whole book is suffused with light, also with this sadness and religious—I
think that’s the word—longing. Reading the third volume, I began to see
how much it is a journal of a certain kind of longing. And I was surprised
to see how much the three books as a sequence reminded me of a poem I
hadn’t read in years, Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H., that Victorian poem
Now&Then_Interior_REV5.indd 149
3/20/07 2:27:23 PM
* * *
150 Robert Hass / 1999
of doubt and religious longing I’d read in college and once or twice since.
Most of what I carried away from it was a single line about a dark night
of the soul and a morning that reveals nothing:
On the bald street breaks the blank day.
There is a little sequence of poems that runs through Wright’s books
called “The Appalachian Book of the Dead.” And a sequence in this book
is called “Opus Posthumous.” There is a feeling in these poems of a con-
sciousness on the edge of getting rid of the world, sloughing it off, study-
ing the light for some sign that the old hymns are true, that something is
coming to carry us home. The desire for it in the book’s last poem is like
a longing for absolute beauty. The poem itself is beautiful, almost apoca-
lyptic, and—for me—a little scary:
Opus Posthumous III
Mid-August meltdown, Assurbanipal in the west,
Scorched cloud-towers, crumbling thrones—
The ancients knew to expect a balance at the end of things,
The burning heart against the burning feather of truth.
Sweet-mouthed,
Big ibis-eyed, in the maple’s hieroglyphs, I write it down.
All my life I’ve looked for this slow light, this smallish light
Starting to seep, coppery blue,
out of the upper right-hand corner of things,
Down through the trees and off the back yard,
Rising and falling at the same time, now rising, now falling,
Inside the lapis lazuli of late afternoon.
Until the clouds stop, and hush.
Until the left hedge and the right hedge,
the insects and short dogs,
The back porch and barn swallows grain-out and disappear.
Until the bypass is blown with silence, until the grass grieves.
Until there is nothing else.
Now&Then_Interior_REV5.indd 150
3/20/07 2:27:24 PM
* * *
1999 / Now & Then 151
This makes a cycle: from the annunciatory light of early spring to the
grand closures of a late summer sunset. So grand it wants the clouds to
stop.
Wright was born in Tennessee. He’s a Southern poet whose work has
been, for a long time, inflected by his love of Italian poetry and by the
rhythms of Ezra Pound, out of which he’s made his own music. Some of
his best poems come from moments when his imagination seems to be
idling, letting his attention find its focus, letting the world seep in, waiting
for a music to come up. Almost like someone plucking at a guitar, waiting
for the melody to take him, to tell him who he is or where he is. Here’s
one more:
Deep Measure
Shank of the afternoon, wan weight-light,
Undercard of a short month,
February Sunday . . .
Wordlessness of the wrong world.
In the day’s dark niche, the patron saint of What-Goes-Down
Shuffles her golden deck and deals,
one for you and one for me . . .
And that’s it, a single number—we play what we get.
My hand says measure,
doves on the wire and the first bulb blades
Edging up through the mulch-mat,
Inside-out of the winter gum trees,
A cold harbor, cold stop and two-step, and here it comes,
Deep measure,
deep measure that runnels beneath the bone,
That sways our attitude and sets our lives to music;
Deep measure, down under and death-drawn:
Pilgrim, homeboy of false time,
Listen and set your foot down,
listen and step lightly.
Now&Then_Interior_REV5.indd 151
3/20/07 2:27:24 PM
* * *
152 Robert Hass / 1999
april 11
Richard Wright and Langston Hughes
A surprise: a book of haiku written in his last years by the fierce and
original American novelist, Richard Wright. Wright changed American
literature by writing books—Native Son, Black Boy—that did not aim,
as much of African American writing up to his time had done, to honor
and celebrate African American experience; he wrote instead about the
fact that poverty, discrimination, and hopelessness are not necessarily a
formula for producing virtuous citizens. He wrote, especially in Native
Son, the novel that brought him to public attention and became an un-
expected best-seller in 1940, about the consequences of racism with an
angry exactness that took readers—black and white—by surprise.
After the success of Native Son Wright moved to France and bought
a farm in Normandy. His life there was partly exile and partly expa-
triation. He escaped the daily humiliations of living with American
apartheid, made friends with French writers like Sartre and Camus,
and followed from a distance the controversy that continued to swirl
about his reputation in the United States. He’d been for a while a Com-
munist, like many other young American writers of the thirties, and into
the 1950s American intelligence agencies kept black radical expatriates
under surveillance.
It was in this context that, during the last eighteen months of his life,
Wright discovered haiku. From the summer of 1959 until his death in late
1960, he studied the form and wrote, according to his editor, 4,000 poems.
And then, “sifting through them to see if they are any good,” he wrote to a
friend, he put together a collection, Haiku: This Other World, which has only
now been published in its entirety by Arcade Publishing in New York.
What an outpouring! Wright’s way with the form was to keep strictly
to the syllable count of the Japanese tradition—five syllables, seven syl-
lables, five syllables. Many of the poems seem to be imitating and trying
out Japanese ideas, applying them to the French countryside or to the
remembered rural Mississippi of his childhood. Others try to bring the
form to urban themes. Others—the most original—reach into the pulse
of his own life.
Now&Then_Interior_REV5.indd 152
3/20/07 2:27:24 PM
* * *
1999 / Now & Then 153
The first poem in the book suggests why the form was so useful to
him. I can’t quote it directly—the publisher required permissions fees
much larger than the budget of this book allowed us to pay but you will
get a sense of it if I tell you it describes the sensation of a man watching a
red sun go down in the fall and feeling like it’s taking his name with it. In
the brevity and ambiguity of haiku, you don’t know if this is a premoni-
tion of death and a reflection on human insignificance, or if it carries in
it a feeling of liberation—momentary or not—from the burden of being
who he was, as if working in this small form with its requirement of quiet
attention, he has been lifted away for a moment from his writer’s vita, his
radical’s dossier, the fury of a life of literary controversy, and been given
permission to be, to look.
In one poem, making a comedy of this, he gives the spring rain “per-
mission” to soak a bed of violets. In another he observes a dog smelling
out the telegram in the wet trunk of a tree. Some of them look back on
his own life and also seem to absorb into him his own mortality. Another
haiku watches an autumn bonfire of fallen leaves grow “bigger and big-
ger,” a commentary on aging, but also a pun on the name of the angry
black man, Bigger Thomas, who was the protagonist of Native Son.
Mostly they are shot through with moments of small intense obser-
vation: a warm wind drying a strand of hair on a woman’s forehead;
something about the straight lines of black steel in the railroad tracks that
seems to have caused the snow that’s falling on them; a hitchhiker in spring
rain—something untrustworthy about his posture—who’s not going to
get a ride; summer rain and lights from a hospital slowly going on and
off. It is wonderful to watch a writer practicing attention, and inspiring
to see Richard Wright, past the burden of his fame, past politics, racism,
war, exile, determined in this way to have his life on earth and to continue
to have his say. You will have to look up the poems yourself. The book is
worth owning, for the poems themselves and for the light they cast on
Richard Wright’s last years.
I can print one of his poems, because it’s in the public domain. A col-
laboration with his friend Langston Hughes, it is an experiment in literary
adaptation of the blues. It was published in the radical journal New Masses
in August 1939:
Now&Then_Interior_REV5.indd 153
3/20/07 2:27:24 PM
* * *
154 Robert Hass / 1999
Red Clay Blues
I miss that red clay, Lawd, I
Need to feel it in my shoes.
Says, miss that red clay, Lawd, I
Need to feel it in my shoes.
I want to get to Georgia cause I
Got them red clay blues.
Pavement’s hard on my feet, I’m
Tired o’ this concrete street.
Pavement’s hard on my feet, I’m
Tired o’ this city street.
Goin’ back to Georgia where
That red clay can’t be beat.
I want to tramp in the red mud, Lawd, and
The red clay round my toes.
I want to wade in that red mud,
Feel that red clay suckin’ at my toes.
I want my little farm back, and I
Don’t care where the landlord goes.
