monday poem #145: Robert Hass, "Envy of Other People's Poems"
Robert Hass, whose work I've never read before, was the Poet Laureate from 1995 to 1997, a fact which, if I ever knew it, I had forgotten before picking up this book at a neighbor's house last night. I picked it up because it has a very pretty cover and I am an easily influenced magpie-like creature when it comes to book covers. The first poem is a two-line gem about a farmer in Iowa in January, all the more gem-like for me personally because I have been reading gardening books for the past week, but the one that really caught me and cemented my interest is this one. I suspect that truepenny will like it too.
Envy of Other People's Poems
In one version of the legend the sirens couldn't sing.
It was only a sailor's story that they could.
So Odysseus, lashed to the mast, was harrowed
By a music that he didn't hear-plungings of sea,
Wind-sheer, the off-shore hunger of the birds-
And the mute women gathering kelp for garden mulch,
Seeing him strain against the cordage, seeing
The awful longing in his eyes, are changed forever
On their rocky waste of island by their imagination
Of his imagination of the song they didn't sing.
- Robert Hass
from Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005
Envy of Other People's Poems
In one version of the legend the sirens couldn't sing.
It was only a sailor's story that they could.
So Odysseus, lashed to the mast, was harrowed
By a music that he didn't hear-plungings of sea,
Wind-sheer, the off-shore hunger of the birds-
And the mute women gathering kelp for garden mulch,
Seeing him strain against the cordage, seeing
The awful longing in his eyes, are changed forever
On their rocky waste of island by their imagination
Of his imagination of the song they didn't sing.
- Robert Hass
from Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005