Robert Hass Imitation poems

Did these imitation poems for class....pretty proud of them.

HYDRANGEAS, FOR HENRI

How often we drizzled back home
in the frosted foliaged dawn
those first few months of passion
and found that ice and snow
had stripped away leaves
leaving raw branches, tipped,
scraping at our bedroom window.
By spring your love for me grew,
swelled like heated roses in a vase.
We were so enamoured
we dared til death do us part,
a bouquet of summer hydrangeas in hand,
proving to each other, and ourselves,
that love, like this, existed irrelevant of time.
New York seemed less chaotic in those days
when we skipped work
to sleep in with heavy curtains
and the muffled scent of last night’s perfume.


SUMMER

We brought books, music,
A Brazilian beach towel.
In Miami on the beach,
you asked me “Alice, are you happy?”
as we lay sun-strewn across the sand.
The sky, like a furnace, de-thawed
our New York bodies. Noon,
we broke out iced watermelons
and berries, blue and black
staining your smile. Dusk was
a huge phosphorescent jellyfish
ascending and descending along the horizon.
Our hotel room waited, and our food
from the local grocery store. Cooking
naked, you sang “silently reflection
turns my world to stone, patiently
correction leaves us all alone.”
and when I said “I’m the happiest I’ve
ever been,” you smiled.

We dreamt all night of beaches.



CONCERNING THE AFTERLIFE, THE MANHATTANITES HAVE ONLY THE DIMMEST NOTIONS


It is night because the sun has set.

I wake slowly in the early evening
paddle bare-feet across wood floor
to make coffee.
It smells of earth
and wild berries dipped in chocolate.
Outside, the drizzled streetlights blur
moving rainbows over cars driving
past our window.

After coffee,
you put on some ambient music
and I begin the process of getting dressed.
There is nothing to wear, in a walk-in
closet full of clothes.

I see you post-shower,
Your hair spiked in water dew, skin
fresh and red from scrub and heat.
This song brings back memories,
hazy days of sand and salted bodies,
phosphorescent jellyfish,
and peeling summer skin.

We are ready for the night out.
The taxi driver speaks no English
after dark. Driving down the West
Side Highway, some stars uncrowded
by the city lights.
Dancing
tipsy-turvy, drunk on motion, music,
each other, people blurring in concentric circles
all around us.
We will stumble
finally, towards home
and touch and drift towards morning.


HAPPINESS

Because last Sunday afternoon
we took a stroll through Inwood Hill Park
the last piece of old New York,
(really old New York)
wild and unsculpted,
by the hands of Olmsted and Vaux.
The trees, primordial and aflamed,
gifted us with offerings of bronze-crisped leaves
carried down by the messenger wind.
and because we hiked spiraling
toward the top, breath-taken by a
long stretch of the Hudson and Jersey
unpolluted by boats and water traffic,
undulating, peaceful, reminiscent---
I thought of Manhattan before that fated
day of the bead-trade, when land belonged
to no one, just the gazelles, galloping,
disappearing through thick branches.

and because at the top we spotted a rock
on a ledge that overlooked the river,
we sat haunch to haunch, two hands in
one mitten, I thought: happiness!
It is November, getting chilly,
but my heart has never felt so naked
and so warm.