Spring Drawing 2, Robert Hass

A man says lilacs against white houses, two sparrows, one streaked, in a
thinning birch, and can't find his way to a sentence.

In order to be respectable, Thorstein Veblen said, desperate in Palo
Alto, a thing must be wasteful, i.e., "a selective adaptation of forms to
the end of conspicuous waste."

So we try to throw nothing away, as Keith, making dinner for us as his
grandmother had done in Jamaica, left nothing; the kitchen was as clean
at the end as when he started; even the shrimp shells and carrot fronds
were part of the process,

and he said, when we tried to admire him, "Listen, I should send you
into the chickenyard to look for a rusty nail to add to the soup for iron."

The first temptation of Sakyamuni was desire, but he saw that it led to
fulfillment and then to desire, so that one was easy.

Because I have pruned it badly in successive years, the climbing rose
has sent out, among the pale pink floribunda, a few wild white roses
from the rootstalk.

Suppose, before they said silver or moonlight or wet grass, each poet
had to agree to be responsible for the innocence of all the suffering on
earth,

because they learned in arithmetic, during the long school days, that if
there was anything left over,

you had to carry it. The wild rose looks weightless, the floribunda are
heavy with the richness and sadness of Europe

as they imitate the dying, petal by petal, of the people who bred them.

You hear pain singing in the nerves of things; it is not a song.

The gazelle's head turned; three jackals are eating his entrails and he
is watching.