Robert Hass - "A Sunset"

A Sunset

The sky tonight on the top of the ridge
Was bruise-colored, a yellow-brown
That is one definition of the word “sordid,”
Which, I think, used to describe
That color, carries neither a moral
Nor an aesthetic judgment. The sky
At dusk was sordid and then brightened
And softened to a glowing peach
Of brief but astonishing beauty,
If you happened to be paying attention.
I could take a hard right here
To the angry adolescent boy in Texas
Who shot and killed nineteen children
With a high-powered weapon my culture
Put into his hands. How to enter
The hive of that mind and undo what
The imagination had done there?
He wore a flak jacket, bought two rifles
At a local store, one of which fires forty rounds
A minute. He had it specifically in mind
To kill children of that age, the lithe-
Bodied young in their end-of-term clothing.
The connective tissue in this veering
Is the idea that it is the experience of beauty,
Not rules, not fear of consequences
Or reverence for authority, that informs
Our moral sense. This may be where
John Ashbery would introduce a non sequitur,
Not from aversion to responsibility
But from a sense he no doubt had
That there was a kind of self-importance
In the introduction of morality to poetry
And that one might, therefore, be better off
Practicing one’s art in more or less
The spirit of the poor juggler in the story
Of Christmas who, having no gift to bring
To the infant god, crept into the church
In the night and faced the crèche and juggled.

Play, beauty, the impulse to reproduce it,
The impulse to evoke and bring to rage
And then to stillness the violence
In our natures. One does not,
The argument is, watch “Lear” and then
Go out and kill someone. The next veering,
Undertaken without cynicism but
In a spirit of frankness (leaving aside
Plato’s originary arguments), would be
To introduce the collection of records
They found in Adolf Hitler’s bunker.
There were more than a hundred
Of them: Wagner, of course, the operas
Especially, but also Mussorgsky,
Rachmaninoff. He must have turned,
To rest his mind, from reports on the success
Of Zyklon B to the concertos of Rachmaninoff.
Monet might be the counter-argument.
I’ve read that, in his distress at hearing
Descriptions of the violence of the earlier war,
The mud and excrement and rotting bodies
And barbed wire, poison gas, the rows
On rows of young men hurled by their officers
At one another’s cannons and machine guns,
He rose one morning, walked down to his studio
By the pond at Giverny, and began
To paint the water lilies and kept painting them
As long as his hand could hold a brush.

It’s late. I need to return to the subject
Of that boy’s mind and the art we practice.
And the sunset—peach to dull gold which faded
To what felt, for just a second, for less
Than a second, a blessed and arriving silence,
And then a pale green at the skyline,
And then dark. And it was Monday night.

Plato’s idea, I think, was that beauty
Was an ordering of elements the world offered
And that the harmonies in that order
Taught the soul the good. A later culture
Would say that boy was taken by a demon
And study ways to exorcise it. The devil
Had a name: it was the love of evil.
And us? Is there a practice of the arts
That would install, inform, would
Deeply root a culture that would form
A mind or heart in which those young bodies
On the classroom floor had become
Unimaginable, from a love of the good
As ordinary as the children’s tennis shoes?
Probably not. Do we need to be able
To touch that mind? At that age?
It could have come from being laughed at.
Once. Or perhaps there was a sexual thrill
In putting on the costume, carrying
The rifle, saying I Am Doom as he strode
Across the parking lot. Is there a way
To undo the stew of computer games
And horror films and superhero fantasies
That gave a language to the moral injury
He wanted to inflict? Or the culture
Of resentment and fear that put the weapon
In his hands? Those people run governments.
Here’s another hard right turn. Think
Of how Walt Whitman loved this country,
Loved the President who died. Imagined
Himself as a hand brushing a fly from the brow
Of a sleeping child. In the dark
I thought of a radiant ordinariness
That burned, that burned and burned.

- Robert Hass

Robert Hass - "Paschal Lamb"

Paschal Lamb

Well, David had said–it was snowing outside and his voice contained
many registers of anger, disgust, and wounded justice, I think it's crazy.
I'm not going to be a sacrificial lamb.

In Greece sometimes, a friend told me, when she walked on the high
road above the sea back to her house from the village in the dark, and
the sky seemed immense, the moon terribly bright, she wondered if her
life would be a fit gift.

And there is that poor heifer in the poem by Keats, all decked out in
ribbons and flowers, no terror in the eyes, no uncontrollable slobber of
mucus at the muzzle, since she didn't understand the festivities.

And years later, after David had quit academic life, he actually
bought a ranch in Kentucky near a town called Pleasantville, and
began to raise sheep.

When we visited that summer and the nights were shrill with crickets
and the heat did not let up, we traded stories after dinner and he told us
again the story about his first teaching job and the vice president.

When he bought the place, he had continued his subscription to The
Guardian and Workers Vanguard, but they piled up in a corner un-
read. He had a mortgage to pay. He didn't know a thing about raising
animals for slaughter, and so he read The American Sheepman with an
intensity of concentration he had never even approximated when he
was reading political theory for his Ph.D. orals.

The vice president of the United States, after his term in office,
accepted a position as a lecturer in political science at a small college in
his home district, where David had just taken his first job. The dean
brought Hubert Humphrey around to introduce him to the faculty.
When they came to David's office, the vice president, expensively
dressed, immensely hearty, extended his hand and David did not feel
he could take it because he believed the man was a war criminal; and
not knowing any way to avoid the awkwardness, he said so, which
was the beginning of his losing the job at that college.

But that was the dean's doing. The vice president started to cry. He had
the hurt look, David said, of a kicked dog with a long, unblemished
record of loyalty and affection, this man who had publicly defended,
had praised the terror bombing of villages full of peasants. He seemed
to David unimaginably empty of inner life if he could be hurt rather
than affronted by a callow young man making a stiffly moral gesture in
front of two men his father's age. David said that he had never looked
at another human being with such icy, wondering detachment, and that
he hadn't liked the sensation.

And so in the high-ceilinged kitchen, in the cricket-riddled air drenched
with the odor of clover, we remembered Vic Doyno in the snow in Buffalo,
in the days when the war went on continuously like a nightmare in our
waking and sleeping hours.

Vic had come to work flushed with excitement at an idea he had had in
the middle of the night. He had figured out how to end the war. It was
a simple plan. Everyone in the country–in the world, certainly a lot
of Swedish and English students would go along–who was opposed
to the war would simply cut off the little finger on the left hand and
send it to the president. Imagine! They would arrive slowly at first, the
act of one or two maniacs, but the news would hit the newspapers and
the next day there would be a few more. And the day after that more.
And on the fourth day there would be thousands. And on the fifth day,
clinics would be set up–organized by medical students in Madison,
San Francisco, Stockholm, Paris–to deal with the surgical procedure
safely and on a massive scale. And on the sixth day, the war would stop.
It would stop. The helicopters at Bien Hoa would sit on the airfields
in silence like squads of disciplined mosquitoes. Peasants, worried and
curious because peasants are always worried and curious, would stare
up curiously into the unfamiliar quiet of a blue, cirrus-drifted sky. And
years later we would know each other by those missing fingers. An
aging Japanese businessman minus a little finger on his left hand would
notice the similarly mutilated hand of his cab driver in Chicago, and
they would exchange a fleeting unspoken nod of fellowship.

And it could happen. All we had to do to make it happen–Vic had
said, while the water for tea hissed on the hot plate in David's chilly
office and the snow came down thick as cotton batting, was cut off our
little fingers right now, take them down to the department secretary, and
have her put them in the mail.

- Robert Hass