Have you ever come across a piece of poetry or prose that seemed like it was written just for you? The kind of literature that makes your jaw drop a little, gives you a familiar sense of wonder and light that feels absolutely delicious? 

Maybe it’s just because I’m a huge literature nerd (and English major, natch), but when this happens to me, it’s a bit of a religious experience. Usually the author earns a happy home in the treasure box of favorites in my heart. Among such lovelies are Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift from the Sea.   

And today! Today I’m so pleased to add Robert Hass’ “Meditation at Lagunitas.” 

It absolutely plucked the heartstrings of my soul. It just so happened to be the first poem my poetry professor wanted us to discuss this morning after going over the syllabus. I’d never even heard of Robert Hass before (except in regards to Occupy Berkeley). Regardless of his overall influence in the rest of the course, I’m buying his work with the rest of my textbooks. 

This piece is everything haunting, everything nostalgic, everything forest and underfoot in the entire world. Enjoy! 

“Meditation at Lagunitas”

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.

Read this poem and more works by Robert Hass at the Poetry Foundation. 

*As a belated side note to this post (since it was written yesterday), I met with my Honors English class today for the first time, and we also discussed this poem. I think perhaps the Thesis Gods are trying to tell me something.  

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