Blackberry, Blackberry, Blackberry

With a title like “Meditation at Lagunitas”, I expected Robert Hass’s poem to be a bit more soothing than it is. Though the images represented in his work are beautiful and vivid, they are connected to one of the author’s solemn memories; a past lover he was enamored with. The poem begins with the line, “All the new thinking is about loss.” Hass then delves into this idea in the proceeding lines, using images such as a “clown- / faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk / of that black birch” to extend the tone of tone of grief he feels after losing his lover and, in a way, some sort of natural setting of his childhood. The woodpecker symbolizes his own form of personal sadness, and the black birch is, in a way, his psyche after suffering the losses he has experienced. Hass then begins to describe a scene in which he is sharing a “thin wire of grief” with a “querulous” tone with a friend of his. (Querulous, by the way, means ‘in a petulant manner’, and it might be my new favorite word) This scene is also depicted to be late at night, so it gives the reader an idea of a dark, gray setting in which two friends are sharing their woes. It’s almost as if the air around you turns just as somber as you continue to read from Hass’s experiences. He begins to describe of a woman he had intimate relations with, and how being with her reminded him of his childhood home. This portion of the work is written so beautifully and seamlessly that the audience can sense his “thirst for salt”, see the “island willows”, and hear the “silly music from the pleasure boat”. At this point, just with his vivid imagery, Hass manages to make the reader feel both longing for a lost lover and a childhood home which they have never had. Hass then returns to the image of the woman, saying how he remembers “the way her hands dismantled bread, / the thing her father said that hurt her, / what she dreamed.” Here Hass has managed to take the reader from a somber scene in the middle of the night, to a bright memory of his childhood, and then back to images of the woman he is lamenting in the first place. Through his vivid words it’s almost impossible not to see each one of the things he describes, and to feel sorrow that they are gone. At the close of the poem, I felt as if I should have been saying “blackberry” with Hass to grieve with him.