Time and Materials

by Robert Hass

And the mute women gathering kelp for garden mulch, Seeing him strain against the cordage, seeing The awful longing in his eyes, are changed forever On their rocky waste of island by their imagination Of his imagination of the song they didn’t sing.

The sound of the owls outside And the wind soughing in the trees

It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us.

If the horror of the world were the truth of the world, he said, there would be no one to say it and no one to say it to.

Some vertical gesture then, the way that anger Or desire can rip a life apart, Some wound of color.

Poetry should be able to comprehend the earth, To set aside from time to time its natural idioms Of ardor and revulsion, and say, in a style as sober As the Latin of Lucretius, who reported to Venus On the state of things two thousand years ago— “It’s your doing that under the wheeling constellations Of the sky,” he wrote, “all nature teems with life—”

What is to be done with our species? Because We know we’re going to die, to be submitted To that tingling dance of atoms once again, It’s easy for us to feel that our lives are a dream— As this is, in a way, a dream: the flailing rain, The birds, the soaked red backpack of the child, Her tendrils of wet hair, the windshield wipers, This voice trying to speak across the centuries Between us, even the long story of the earth, Boreal forests, mangrove swamps, Tiberian wheatfields In the summer heat on hillsides south of Rome—all of it A dream, and we alive somewhere, somehow outside it, Watching.

In the old torment of the earth When the fires were cooling and disposing themselves Into granite and limestone and serpentine and shale, It is possible to imagine that, under yellowish chemical clouds, The molten froth, having burned long enough, Was already dreaming of release, And that the dream, dimly But with increasingly distinctness, took the form Of water, and that it was then, still more dimly, that it imagined The dark green skin and opal green flesh of cucumbers.

So long, horse mint, Your piebald mix of lavender and soft gray-green under the cottonwoods On a shelf of lichened granite near a creek May be the most startling thing in these mountains, Besides the mountains. It’s good that we stopped just a minute To look at you and then walked down the trail Because we had things to do And because beauty is a little unendurable, I mean, getting used to it is unendurable, Because if we can’t eat a thing or do something with it, Human beings get bored by almost everything eventually, Which is why winter is such an admirable invention. There’s another month of summer here. August will squeeze the sweetness out of you And drift it as pollen.