#230 Heroic Simile (Robert Hass)

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HEROIC SIMILE

When the swordsman fell in Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai

in the gray rain,

in the Cinemascope and the Tokugawa dynasty,

he fell straight as a pine, he fell

as Ajax fell in Homer

in chanted dactyls and the tree was so huge

the woodsman returned for two days

to that lucky place before he was done with the sawing

and on the third day he brought his uncle.

They stacked logs in the resinous air,

hacking the small limbs off,

tying those bundles separately.

The slabs near the root

were quartered and still they were awkwardly large;

the logs from the midtree they halved:

ten bundles and four great piles of fragrant wood,

moons and quarter moons and half moons

ridged by the saw’s tooth.

The woodsman and the old man his uncle

are standing in midforest

on a floor of pine silt and spring mud.

They have stopped working

because they are tired and because

I have imagined no pack animal   

or primitive wagon. They are too canny

to call in neighbors and come home

with a few logs after three days’ work.

They are waiting for me to do something   

or for the overseer of the Great Lord

to come and arrest them.

How patient they are!

The old man smokes a pipe and spits.

The young man is thinking he would be rich

if he were already rich and had a mule.

Ten days of hauling

and on the seventh day they’ll probably

be caught, go home empty-handed

or worse. I don’t know

whether they’re Japanese or Mycenaean

and there’s nothing I can do.

The path from here to that village

is not translated. A hero, dying,

gives off stillness to the air.

A man and a woman walk from the movies

to the house in the silence of separate fidelities.

There are limits to imagination.