Longing.

This poem has been – very fondly – on my mind all day today. “Longing, we say, because desire is full/of endless distances” is one of the most perfect things I have ever read.





Meditation at Lagunitas


By Robert Hass b. 1941 Robert Hass






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.


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