Robert Hass

AGAINST THE WIND

My first wife’s older sister’s third husband’s daughter—

That’s about as long as a line of verse should get—

A field anthropologist’s kinship map? karmic debris?—

Just sailed by me on the Berkeley street. Desire

that hollows us out and hollows us out, that kills us

And kills us and raises us up and raises us up.

Always laughable seen from the outside: the English wit

Who complained of sex that ‘the posture was ridiculous’

Had not been struck down by the god or goddess

To whose marble threshing floor offerings of grapes

Or olive boughs and flowers or branches laden

With new fruit or bound bundles of heavy-headed wheat

Were brought as to any other mystery or power.

My friend sat on the back steps on a summer night

Sick with her dilemma, smoking long cigarettes

While bats veered in the dark and the scraping sound

Of a neighbor cleaning off a grill with a wire brush

Ratcheted steadily across the backyard fence.

“He’s the nicest man I could imagine,” she had said,

“And I feel like I’m dying.” Probably in her middle thirties

Then. Flea markets on Saturday morning, family dinners

On Sundays, a family large enough so that there was always

A birthday, some maiden aunt from the old neighborhood

In San Francisco, or a brother-in-law, or one of the children.

Had not lived where, tearing, or like burnished leaves

In a vortex of wind, the part of you that might observe

The comedy of gasps and moans, gives way, does not

Demur. Though she did laugh at herself. An erotic

Attachment one whole winter to the mouth

Of a particular television actor—she’d turn the TV on—

Watch him for a minute with a kind of sick yearning—

Shake her head—turn the TV off—go back to the translation

Of Van Gogh’s letters, which was her project that winter—

Or do some ironing—that always seemed to calm her—

The sweet iron smell of steam and linen. “Honest to God,”

She’d say, an expression the elderly aunts might have used,

“For Pete’s sake,” she’d say, “Get yourself together.”

Hollow flute, or bell not struck, sending out a shimmering

Not-sound, in waves and waves, to the place where the stunned dead

In the not-beginning are gathered to the arms of the living

In the not-noon: the living who grieve, who rage against and grieve

The always solicited, always unattended dead

In the tiered plazas or lush meadows of their gathered

Absence. A man wants a woman that way. A person a person.

Down on all fours, ravenous and humbled. And later—

“Lovers , you remember the shoeshine boys in Quito

In the city market. Missing teeth, unlaced tennis shoes.

They approach you smiling, their hands are scrofulous,

They have no rules, and they’ll steal anything,

And so would you if you were they.” The capital

Has been sacked, the temple hangings burned, and peasants

In the ruins are roasting the royal swans in a makeshift pit

Over a fire coaxed from sticks of the tax assessor’s
Empire chair up against a broken wall. Lent: the saints’ bodies

Dressed in purple sacks to be taken off at Easter.

For Magdalen, of course, the resurrection didn’t mean

She’d got him back. It meant she’d lost him in another way.

It was the voice she loved, the body, not the god,

Who, she had been told, had ascended to his heaven,

There to disperse tenderness and pity on earth.