Contemporary Poetry

environment and space 141

rifi ed about poststructuralism and seized on ‘Meditation at

Lagunitas’ as an antistructuralist Whitmanian affi rmation.

They took me to be reopening the mindless door into the

American sublime.^20

The poem begins with an evocation of absence, pointing us
towards the notion that ‘All the new thinking is about loss’ (p. 4 ).
The speaker takes elements from his environment as illustrations
of this idea. The woodpecker is ‘by his presence, / some tragic
falling off from a fi rst world of undivided light’ (p. 4 ). Here ref-
erences to an Edenic landscape where words are wedded to the
things they signify create an impression of a lost transcendent
language. However, Hass plays with these ideas by humorously
suggesting that since there is ‘no one thing to which the bramble
of blackberry corresponds to / a word is elegy to what it signifi es’
(p. 4 ). ‘Meditation at Lagunitas’ asks that if language is only a
system of pointing, gesturing to absence, then what becomes of
concepts such as justice, love and empathy? The speaker refl ects
that ‘After a while I understood that talking this way, everything
dissolves: justice, / pine, hair, woman, You, and I’ (p. 4 ). Far from
inhibiting a narrative, these words create their own associations
and patterns of reminiscences. The poem not only inscribes a
series of losses, but transforms abstract thought into physical-
ity and eroticism. Hass’s speaker recalls a lover, which leads to a
recalling of desire, a ‘thirst for salt, for my childhood river’ (p. 4 ).
His use of personal narrative is juxtaposed with more theoreti-
cal pronouncements such as: ‘Longing, we say, because desire is
full / of endless distances’ (pp. 4 – 5 ). The meditation on language
theory, placed into the context of an absent lover, devolves into a
consideration of erotic love. These fi nal lines reinforce a linkage
between the erotic and material world, pointing to moments when
‘the body is as numinous / as words’ (p. 5 ). The poem’s close
attempts to fuse the natural world with language as the speaker
refl ects upon: ‘Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
/ saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry’ (p. 5 ). The enforced
repetition of blackberry emphasises a delicious delight in the
physicality of the word. This appreciation for the physical world is
echoed in Hass’s recent poetry where he claims ‘It’s not / Just the