Blog o’ Gnosis

I was introduced to this poem years ago and loved it. Last week, browsing in a used book store, I found it again and immediately bought the book of poems it was in: Praise, by Robert Haas. I used to use his line about longing and distance as my email signature. Ross and I took our family to Lagunitas Creek one weekend way back to work on habitat restoration there. Reading this poem brings the creek to mind, and as I stand outside gazing at the mouth of Tomales Bay, I imagine teleporting just a bit farther south to sit quietly on its banks, watching the woods and breathing that sweet air.

Meditation at Lagunitas
by Robert Haas

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 8th, 2006 at 10:28 pm and is filed under Poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.