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Robert Hass - Meditation At Lagunitas

2014-10-29 218 Dailymotion

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

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