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Robert Hass
LATE SPRING
And then in mid-May the first morning of steady heat,
the morning, Leif says, when you wake up, put on shorts, and that's it for the day,
when you pour coffee and walk outside, blinking in the sun.
Strawberries have appeared in the markets, and peaches will soon;
squid is so cheap in the fishstores you begin to consult Japanese and Italian cookbooks for the various ingenious ways of preparing ika and calamari;
and because the light will enlarge your days, your dreams at night will be as strange as the jars of octopus you saw once in a fisherman's boat under the summer moon;
and after swimming, white wine; and the sharing of stories before dinner is prolonged because the relations of the children in the neighborhood have acquired village intensity and the stories take longer telling;
and there are the nights when the fog rolls in that nobody likes — hey, fog, the Miwok sang, who lived here first, you better go home, pelican is beating your wife —
and after dark in the first cool hour, your children sleep so heavily in their beds exhausted from play, it is a pleasure to watch them,
Leif does not move a muscle as he lies there; no, wait; it is Luke who lies there in his eight-year-old body,
Leif is taller than you are and he isn't home; when he is, his feet will extend past the end of the mattress, and Kristin is at the corner in the dark, talking to the neighborhood boys;
things change; there is no need for this dream-compelled narration; the rhythm will keep me awake, changing.
Robert Hass |
For the sights and sounds and smells and flavors of Northern California seasons, this poem's a good companion to Kenneth Rexroth's Autumn In California. Hass does not, in Late Spring, set these things in the larger context of distant, if simultaneous and horrific, world events—as Rexroth does in Autumn. Late Spring is about village intensity, shared stories, family, awakening from sleep, and dreaming in place without need for narration—even while it acknowledges the Italian and Japanese cultures transplanted and at home in the San Francisco Bay Area that still harbors the spirit of its original Miwok inhabitants.
Rexroth's season is anonymous, and, to some degree, so is the place. The ways of the natural world in the Rexroth poem are cousins to those of Robinson Jeffers. When Rexroth returns, at the end of his poem, to the moon rising over Mt. Diablo, and the "loud, wiry, and tremulous" cries of the birds, he's in the zone of Jeffers. And, like Jeffers, he is alone; he chides himself: "should be" thinking of "pretty women and the constellations." But he cannot, the wide world is too much with him, and the right-wing forces are winning the battles that haunt him in Spain and China.
It may be only serendipitous that the poem immediately following Late Spring in Hass' 1990 collection Human Wishes, is Rusia en 1931. The poem takes its title from a book written by César Vallejo about Marxism in the Soviet Union. In the poem Hass engages the world of politics Rexroth turns to at the moment he imagines the clocks and whistles sounding in Barcelona and Nanking. Oscar Romero, Archbishop of San Salvador, is dead. Murdered, by "no one knows who", as he delivered a sermon in March 1980 during El Salvador's long civil war. But the real focus in the poem is two poets, César Vallejo and Osip Mandelstam; Vallejo a Peruvian Stalinist in Spain and Mandelstam an anti-Stalinist in Russia. Vallejo died young, worn out and heartsick at the outcome of the Spanish Civil War. Mandelstam was about the same age when he died in Stalin's Gulag. Both of them died in 1938, the year Rexroth wrote his poem, the year the Fascists won in Spain.
"Poetry proposes no solutions", Hass writes, even as he imagines what the conversation might have been between the two poets, had they, by chance, met in Leningrad in 1931.
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