Robert Hass

New Year's morning— everything is in blossom! I feel about average.…

When I ran, it rained. Late in the afternoon— midsummer, upstate New York, mornings I wrote, read Polish history, and there was a woman whom I thought about; outside the moody, hum…

When the swordsman fell in Kurosawa's Seven Samurai in the gray rain, in Cinemascope and the Tokugawa dynasty, he fell straight as a pine, he fell…

Little green involute fronds of fern at creekside. And the sinewy clear water rushing over creekstone of the palest amber, veined with a darker gold, thinnest lines of gold riverin…

This morning a cat—bright orange—pawing at the one patch of new grass in the sand-and tanbark-colored leaves. And last night the sapphire of the raccoon's eyes in the beam of the…

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 c…

Summoned by conscious recollection, she would be smiling, they might be in a kitchen talking, before or after dinner. But they are in this other room, the window has many small pan…

Many are making love. Up above, the angels in the unshaken ether and crystal of human longing are braiding one another's hair, which is strawberry blond and the texture of cold riv…

Don't worry, spiders, I keep house casually.…

A man talking to his ex-wife on the phone. He has loved her voice and listens with attention to every modulation of its tone. Knowing it intimately. Not knowing what he wants…

They are walking in the woods along the coast and in a grassy meadow, wasting, they come upon two old neglected apple trees. Moss thickened every bough and the wood of the limbs lo…

A sentence with "dappled shadow" in it. Something not sayable spurting from the morning silence, secret as a thrush.…