<i>A Faint Music</i> by Robert Hass<br /><br />Maybe you need to write a poem about grace.<br /><br />When everything broken is broken,<br />and everything dead is dead,<br />and the hero has looked into the mirror with complete contempt,<br />and the heroine has studied her face and its defects<br />remorselessly, and the pain they thought might,<br />as a token of their earnestness, release them from themselves<br />has lost its novelty and not released them,<br />and they have begun to think, kindly and distantly,<br />watching the others go about their days—<br />likes and dislikes, reasons, habits, fears—<br />that self-love is the one weedy stalk<br />of every human blossoming, and understood,<br />therefore, why they had been, all their lives,<br />in such a fury to defend it, and that no one—<br />except some almost inconceivable saint in his pool<br />of poverty and silence—can escape this violent, automatic<br />life’s companion ever, maybe then, ordinary light,<br />faint music under things, a hovering like grace appears.<br /><br />As in the story a friend told once about the time<br />he tried to kill himself. His girl had left him.<br />Bees in the heart, then scorpions, maggots, and then ash.<br />He climbed onto the jumping girder of the bridge,<br />the bay side, a blue, lucid afternoon.<br />And in the salt air he thought about the word “seafood,”<br />that there was something faintly ridiculous about it.<br />No one said “landfood.” He thought it was degrading to the rainbow perch<br />he’d reeled in gleaming from the cliffs, the black rockbass,<br />scales like polished carbon, in beds of kelp<br />along the coast—and he realized that the reason for the word<br />was crabs, or mussels, clams. Otherwise<br />the restaurants could just put “fish” up on their signs,<br />and when he woke—he’d slept for hours, curled up<br />on the girder like a child—the sun was going down<br />and he felt a little better, and afraid. He put on the jacket<br />he’d used for a pillow, climbed over the railing<br />carefully, and drove home to an empty house.<br /><br />There was a pair of her lemon yellow panties<br />hanging on a doorknob. He studied them. Much-washed.<br />A faint russet in the crotch that made him sick<br />with rage and grief. He knew more or less<br />where she was. A flat somewhere on Russian Hill.<br />They’d have just finished making love. She’d have tears<br />in her eyes and touch his jawbone gratefully. “God,”<br />she’d say, “you are so good for me.” Winking lights,<br />a foggy view downhill toward the harbor and the bay.<br />“You’re sad,” he’d say. “Yes.” “Thinking about Nick?”<br />“Yes,” she’d say and cry. “I tried so hard,” sobbing now,<br />“I really tried so hard.” And then he’d hold her for a while—<br />Guatemalan weavings from his fieldwork on the wall—<br />and then they’d fuck again, and she would cry some more,<br />and go to sleep.<br />And he, he would play that scene<br />once only, once and a half, and tell himself<br />that he was going to carry it for a very long time<br />and that there was nothing he could do<br />but carry it. He went out onto the porch, and listened<br />to the forest in the summer dark, madrone bark<br />cracking and curling as the cold came up.<br /><br />It’s not the story though, not the friend<br />leaning toward you, saying “And then I realized—,”<br />which is the part of stories one never quite believes.<br />I had the idea that the world’s so full of pain<br />it must sometimes make a kind of singing.<br />And that the sequence helps, as much as order helps—<br />First an ego, and then pain, and then the singing