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Print version forthcoming  in Issue 20.

2.
I am the stewardess
And I am withholding your oxygen

3.
A delightful part of our
Being together
Was that we were both
Trying to stand outside
Our becoming
In order to watch
How we were together
So I clearly recall
Four people talking and laughing
And talking and watching
All that unbidden, winning abstraction

4.
His tonsure emerges from his hair
As if his neck and face
Were trying hard to lay an egg

5.
Then the snakes on the plane
Kept complaining about having to buy two seats
Because their dinners had to be live
And all the baby snakes
Couldn’t keep tails to selves
Most especially the rattle tails
So the whole thing was
(as they say)
A real clustercoil
And all the while that pipeline
Kept leaking oil.

He chases them with elliptical maneuvers,
Around the cockpit, the bottle, then

Voila: splash of gold and white
Collapse of a wobbly globe in ten
Globes more around the bottle

Sought in giggles, then the tears,
Delicate, light, liquid, lovely
Drifting, derived by light of home.

Sought in nervous laughing, then the tears, hoping only
To attain, illuminated with light of home
So he and his bubbles are delicate, light-
Liquid, lovely, and drifting.

A spaceman travels alone .
A crying, drunk spaceman
Lacks cheeks to cry down
He cries worlds into orbit
If he vomits; you can imagine
The mess.

drunk spacemen weep wobbly worlds
into salt orbits
Spring, love in space, and champagne.

weep worlds
into orbit
Sometimes they vomit: a chunk giant.

Spread out across a long spectrum;
It is a spectrum inclusive of socks,
Hair jellies, catfish fantasies, and long
Nauseas of relentless questions:

All the undulating leaves of these oak trees
Caught in the twilight sun and all the hope
Of this west is pale, stricken and green;
The sharp contrast of each grass blade
Balancing a moment of inchworm silk
Like the thin network of human souls
Crossing and crisscrossing appointed razors.

I never believed in the presence of angels, but my dreams have changed,
And when, recently, I found an underground grotto filled with treasure,
And we were moving the sacks together, I asked him
For one more moment of the dream, which gave me peace.

-Czeslaw Milosz

At this point,
She was watching the inchworm,
Who had started pooping
A muddy trail of inch poop
Across her iPad’s pad,
So she couldn’t text him back
To acknowledge the red Chrysanthemum
Or accept
His invitation to dinner

At this point,
The inchworms decided:
You know what?
We’re just having a ball
Just pooping on this stuff;
Let’s just get married,
Which they were:
Delicate, expensive affair
Among the red Columbines.

There are nine new poems, and most of them are long enough to be broken into sections. Many are stories or long selections from notebooks. While they do not feel as though Hass has fully digested them, they bear his steady voice and keen observation. Hass’ work has always tended to be narrative, and his new poems verge on being short stories. An interesting shift is that they are other people’s stories, yet they pick up on themes scattered across his previous work: heartbreak, the death of his cocaine addicted brother, his alcoholic mother, divorce, love, birdsong, trees.

The new poems once again betray his indebtedness to Czeslaw Milosz. Until his death in 2004, Milosz, an expatriate Lithuanian, was Hass’ colleague at Berkeley and Nobel Laureate in 1980. The Apple Trees at Olema offers new readers a chance to see Milosz influence take root in Human Wishes and blossom in Sun under Wood and Time and Materials. Hass poems become focused and specific in their targets: conversations, thoughts, aspens and the limits of language. Hass has always been fascinated with nature, but never makes it a spiritual force. Though Milosz has steadied his voice, he has not made Hass in his image as a metaphysical poet. Hass new poems show him to be even more of a reductionist, amazed at the biological outerworking of nature in human emotions and behavior. His new poem “Variations on a Passage in Edward Abbey” could almost be a passage in a textbook describing the formation of dunes:

“Viewed in cross section, sand dunes display a characteristic profile.
On the windward side the angle of ascent is low and gradual—

twenty to twenty-five degrees from the horizontal. On the leeward side
the slope is much steeper, usually about thirty-four degrees…”

After an exhaustive description, he describes the movement of dunes to glaciers and then, in the final lines of the poem:

“The movement of grief,
which has something in it of the desert’s bareness
and of its distances.”

At his best, Hass constructs delicate, precise descriptions of the natural world and then uses them to stab us in the heart. He reminds us that we are more connected to each other and to nature than we want to believe. Or he gives delicate, precise descriptions of our lives: barren, without metaphysical trappings or transcendent motivations, but full of compassion against an underlying nothing. It is the nothing that his mentor Milosz fought. It is a nothing Hass feels he cannot evade, yet his writing is full of abundant life. Perhaps it is in quiet defiance.