Improv 2, Week 5

Meditation at Lagunitas
by Robert Hass

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.

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All new thinking is about loss.
Or about oil on canvas which generates more pondering.
The principle is this: Antarctica’s dry valleys
hold enough blackberry bushes to camouflage
an airplane factory. Blue smoldering more blue
until only the memory of blue exists. Mixed in unison
with some family recipe for courage the word
blue shields like the idea to erase. In Naperville, Illinois
the locals mummify old words. More precious than Egyptian
cats, rolled in oils of the gold, the mayor elects
old words once they dry in the mouths of pondering.
The first word ousted was found crusted
on the wooden molar of an abacus, not sliding
but flaking so slow that it could have been a scene
from canvas. No amount of blueberry bushes can hide
all the dead words, there is only the blue and what it signifies.