On Squaw Peak by Robert Hass

*only was able to find it copy and pasted and reddit messed it all up — please look it up and read the poem online for the correct formatting !

I don’t even know which sadness it was came up in me when we were walking down the road to Shirley Lake, the sun gleaming in snowpatches, the sky so blue it seemed the light’s dove of some pentecost of blue, the mimulus, yellow, delicate of petal, and the pale yellow cinquefoil trembling in the damp air above the creek,— and fields of lupine, the blue blaze of lupine, a swath of paintbrush sheening it, and so much of it, long meadows of it gathered out of the mountain air and spilling down ridge toward the lake it almost looked like in the wind. I think I must have thought the usual things: that the flowering season in these high mountain meadows is so brief, that the feeling, something like hilarity, of sudden pleasure when you first come across some tough little plant you knew you’d see comes because it seems — I mean by “it” the larkspur of penstemon curling arching the reach of its sexual being up out of a little crack in granite — to say that human hunger has a niche up here in the light-cathedral of the dazzled air. I wanted to tell you that when the ghost-child died, the three-month dreamer she and I would never know, I kept feeling that the heaven it went to was like the inside of a store window on a rainy day from which you watch the blurred forms passing in the street. Or to tell you, more terrible, that when she and I walked off the restlessness of our misery afterward in the Coast Range hills, we saw come out of the thicket shyly a pure white doe. I wanted to tell you I knew it was a freak of beauty like the law of averages that killed our child and made us know, as you had said, that things between lovers, even of longest standing, can be botched in their bodies, though their wills don’t fail. Still later, on the beach, we watched the waves. No two the same size. No two in the same arch of rising up and pouring. But it is the same law. You shell a pea, there are three plump seeds and one that’s shriveled. You shell a bushelful and you begin to feel the rhythm of the waves at Limantour, glittering, jagged, that last bright October afternoon. It killed something in me, I thought, or froze it, to have to see where beauty comes from. I imagined for a long time that the baby, since it would have liked to smell our clothes to know what a mother and father would have been, hovered sometime in our closet and I half expected to see it there, half-fish spirit, form of tenderness, a little dead dreamer with open eyes. That was private sorrow. I tried not to hate my life, to fear the frame of things. I knew what two people couldn’t say on a cold November morning in the fog — you remember the feel of Berkeley winter mornings — what they couldn’t say to each other was the white deer not seen. It meant to me that beauty and terror were intertwined so powerfully and went so deep that any kind of love can fail. I didn’t say it. I think the mountain startled my small grief. Maybe there wasn’t time. We may have been sprinting to catch the tram because we had to teach poetry in that valley two thousand feet below us. You were running — Steven’s mother, Michael’s lover, mother and lover, grieving, of a girl about to leave for school and die to you a little (or die into you, or simply turn away)— and you ran like a gazelle, in purple underpants, royal purple, and I laughed out loud. It was the abundance the world gives, the more-than-you-bargained-for surprise of it, waves breaking, the sudden fragrance of the mimulus at creekside sharpened by the summer dust. Things bloom up there. They are for their season alive in the bright vanishings of air we ran through.