This reading of Robert Hass’s Sun Under Wood was actually a rereading, sort of. I say “sort of” because I didn’t ever read it thoroughly. I tend to do a cursory reading of books of poetry, jumping around, searching for poems that catch my eye, skipping the ones that seem dense, long, or dull. One of the nice things about reading books of poetry for this project is that the sense of obligation I feel to doing this project to completion every week carries over to the individual books I read; I feel obligated to read a book in its entirety (that is, if I do not abandon it, as I did with Sexing the Body earlier this week, before choosing Sun Under Wood instead), to dwell in its words for the entire week, to miss as little as possible. And it turns out that some of the poems I thought would be dull are not so dull after all. Even the ones which are dull upon first reading often benefit from multiple readings and contemplation.

Sun Under Wood has a great deal of personal significance to me. The first poem in the book is Happiness. It is also the first poem I ever read by Robert Hass. It was left for me in handwritten form on my bed by a lover and (If I may be permitted a brief, overly honest, totally tangential digression: I have a secret affection for the word lover. I prefer it to the neutrality of the word partner which I use more frequently, and vastly prefer it to girlfriend or boyfriend which terms—when I use them, that is; I’m not trying to judge others—fill me with a sort of mild ickiness. I think that what I like about it is that it is an active word. It describes two people engaged together in an action, the task of loving. Were it not so easily met with giggles or raised eyebrows, I think I’d use it all the time to describe my partners. Anyway,) it remains hanging over my bed to this day.

Happiness

Because yesterday morning from the steamy window
we saw a pair of red foxes across the creek
eating the last windfall apples in the rain—
they looked up at us with their green eyes
long enough to symbolize the wakefulness of living things
and then went back to eating—

and because this morning
when she went into the gazebo with her black pen and yellow pad
to coax an inquisitive soul
from what she thinks of as the reluctance of matter,
I drove into town to drink tea in the cafe
and write notes in a journal—mist rose from the bay
like the luminous and indefinite aspect of intention,
and a small flock of tundra swans
for the second winter in a row was feeding on new grass
in the soaked fields; they symbolize mystery, I suppose,
they are also called whistling swans, are very white,
and their eyes are black—

and because the tea steamed in front of me,
and the notebook, turned to a new page,
was blank except for a faint blue idea of order,
I wrote: happiness! it is December, very cold,
we woke early this morning,
and lay in bed kissing,
our eyes squinched up like bats.

What I love about Robert Hass is how his poetry so easily slips between elegant and conversational. He breezes between graceful meditations of nature and his own musings of small (and large) pieces of his life. And also how every poems has layers and facets to be explored. Happiness, for example is really two poems: the poem itself and the poem within the poem at the very end. It’s hard for me to say what the purpose of this layering is, but it works for me and it makes me dig deeply into his poems.

Hass’s poems are quite long, so I’d feel excessive reproducing many of them here, but I’ll share one more—the poem that I revisited the most over the course of this week. The first time I read it, I didn’t feel that the sections hung together, but they stood so beautifully on their own that I was inspired to read it again and again, looking for connections.

Each section, by itself, stands alone, but what I love most is that this poem changes mode and topic with each section, inspiring me to contemplate the connections between them.

Dragonflies Mating

1.

The people who lived here before us
also loved these high mountain meadows on summer mornings.
They made their way up here in easy stages
when heat began to dry the valleys out,
following the berry harvest probably and the pine buds:
climbing and making camp and gathering,
then breaking camp and climbing and making camp and gathering.
A few miles a day. They sent out the children
to dig up bulbs of the mariposa lilies that they liked to roast
at night by the fire where they sat talking about how this year
was different from last year. Told stories,
knew where they were on earth from the names,
owl moon, bear moon, gooseberry moon.

2.

Jaime de Angulo (1934) was talking to a Channel Island Indian
in a Santa Barbara bar. You tell me how your people said
the world was made. Well, the guy said, Coyote was on the mountain
and he had to pee. Wait a minute, Jaime said,
I was talking to a Pomo the other day and he said
Red Fox made the world. They say Red Fox, the guy shrugged,
we say Coyote. So, he had to pee
and he didn’t want to drown anybody, so he turned toward the place
where the ocean would be. Wait a minute, Jaime said,
if there were no people yet, how could he drown anybody?
The Channelleño got a funny look on his face. You know,
he said, when I was a kid, I wondered about that,
and I asked my father. We were living up toward Santa Ynez.
He was sitting on a bench in the yard shaving down fence posts
with an ax, and I said, how come Coyote was worried about people
when he had to pee and there were no people? The guy laughed.
And my old man looked up at me with this funny smile
and said, You know, when I was a kid, I wondered about that.

3.

Thinking about that story just now, early morning heat,
first day in the mountains, I remembered stories about sick Indians
and—in the same thought—standing on the free throw line.

St. Raphael’s parish, where the northern-most of the missions
had been, was founded as a hospital, was named for the angel
in the scriptures who healed the blind man with a fish

he laid across his eyes.—I wouldn’t mind being that age again,
hearing those stories, eyes turned upward toward the young nun
in her white, fresh-smelling, immaculately laundered robes.—

The Franciscan priests who brought their faith in God
across the Atlantic, brought with the baroque statues and metalwork crosses
and elaborately embroidered cloaks, influenza and syphilis and the coughing disease.

Which is why we settled an almost empty California.
There were drawings in the mission museum of the long, dark wards
full of small brown people, wasted, coughing into blankets,

the saintly Franciscan fathers moving patiently among them.
It would, Sister Marietta said, have broken your hearts to see it.
They meant so well, she said, and such a terrible thing

came here with their love. And I remembered how I hated it
after school—because I loved basketball practice more than anything
on earth—that I never knew if my mother was going to show up

well into one of those weeks of drinking she disappeared into,
and humiliate me in front of my classmates with her bright, confident eyes,
and slurred, though carefully pronounced words, and the appalling

impromptu sets of mismatched clothes she was given to
when she had the dim idea of making a good impression in that state.
Sometimes from the gym floor with its sweet, heady smell of varnish

I’d see her in the entryway looking for me, and I’d bounce
the ball two or three times, study the orange rim as if it were,
which it was, the true level of the world, the one sure thing

the power in my hands could summon. I’d bounce the ball
once more, feel the grain of the leather in my fingertips and shoot.
It was a perfect thing; it was almost like killing her.

4.

When we say “mother” in poems,
we usually mean some woman in her late twenties
or early thirties trying to raise a child.

We use this particular noun
to secure the pathos of the child’s point of view
and to hold her responsible.

5.

If you’re afraid now?
Fear is a teacher.
Sometimes you thought that
Nothing could reach her,
Nothing can reach you.
Wouldn’t you rather
Sit by the river, sit
On the dead bank,
Deader than winter,
Where all the roots gape?

6.

This morning in the early sun,
steam rising from the pond the color of smoky topaz,
a pair of delicate, copper-red, needle-fine insects
are mating in the unopened crown of a Shasta daisy
just outside your door. The green flowerheads look like wombs
or the upright, supplicant bulbs of a vegetal pre-erection.
The insect lovers seem to be transferring the cosmos into each other
by attaching at the tail, holding utterly still, and quivering intently.

I think (on what evidence?) that they are different from us.
That they mate and are done with mating.
They don’t carry all this half-mated longing up out of childhood
and then go looking for it everywhere.
And so, I think, they can’t wound each other the way we do.
They don’t go through life dizzy or groggy with their hunger,
kill with it, smear it on everything, though it is perhaps also true
that nothing happens to them quite like what happens to us
when the blue-backed swallow dips swiftly toward the green pond
and the pond’s green-and-blue reflected swallow marries it a moment
in the reflected sky and the heart goes out to the end of the rope
it has been throwing into abyss after abyss, and a singing shimmers
from every color the morning has risen into.

My insect instructors have stilled, they are probably stuck together
in some bliss and minute pulse of after-longing
evolution worked out to suck the last juice of the world
into the receiver body. They can’t separate probably
until it is done.

I wish I could share more of his poems, but it would be unreasonable how long this entry would get if I shared every poem that I love from this book. I’ll just also add that Shame: An Aria is one of my all-time favorite poems. It tells the story of a narrator grappling with his having been caught by strangers picking his nose in an elevator and becomes a startling and insightful meditation on the source of shame and our hidden selves. The end of the poem, every time I read it, bites, just a little.

This is a beautiful book of poetry that means a lot to me. I can’t recommend it enough to everyone else.