ROBERT HASS
They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds
To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds.
[ put this book here for you , who once lived
So that you should vi si t us no more.
41
By 1960, Milosz found himself in Berkeley, California, facing out
to
the Pacific. He wrote of the experience in 1962, beginning wi th a line
from a famous seventeenth-century Polish pastoral poem: "Gently my
lambs, move gently. .. "["Far West"].
"Gently, my lambs, move gently"
Through bays, many, of darkening time.
Sea lions wi th scepters on rocky thrones.
Far, far from everything, throw behind you a comb, a forest will grow,
Throw behind you a mirror, an ocean will ripen. [...
J
As soon as Milosz begins to think about memory, he thinks about
his whole career, and about language. What he says about language is,
for a poet, disturbing. Milosz makes "the instability of the perceiving
subject" seem like child's play. Maybe language should anchor it, the
desired word. This meditation is from his great masterwork "From the
Rising of the Sun":
The Alpine shooting star,
Dodecatholl alpillmll,
Grows in the mountain woods over Rogue River,
Which river, in southern Oregon,
Owing to its rocky, hardly accessible banks,
[s a river of fishermen and hunters. The black bear and the cougar
Are still relatively common on these slopes.
The plant was so named for its pink-purple flowers
Whose slanting tips point
to
the ground from under the petals,
And resembles a star from nineteenth-century illustrations
That falls, pulling along a thin sheaf of lines.
The name was given to the river by French trappers
When one of them stumbled into an Indian ambush.
From that time on they called it La Riviere des Coguins,
The River of Scoundrels, or Rogue, in translation. [.. .
J
