Time & Perspective Quote by Robert Hass

Hass makes the body holy without dragging in religion, then dares language to keep up. “Numinous” is the tell: not just pleasurable, not even just meaningful, but charged, radiant, a little beyond explanation. The line starts by collapsing a familiar hierarchy - words as the elevated medium, the body as the clumsy vessel - and flips it. There are moments, he suggests, when flesh carries the same electric intelligence we usually reserve for poems.

“Days that are the good flesh continuing” sounds almost blunt, even slightly comic in its plainness, and that’s the point. He’s after a sanctity that isn’t abstract. This is not the body as scandal or problem, but the body as duration, as ongoing goodness, as a fact you live inside. The phrase “continuing” quietly widens the frame: tenderness isn’t a peak experience; it’s a practice, a stretch of time where desire, attention, and comfort keep happening.

Then Hass shifts to the small spell at the end: “saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.” The repetition is sensual and childlike, but it’s also technical. He’s showing how a word can become almost edible when you say it enough - all those consonants and berries-in-the-mouth vowels. Subtext: poetry doesn’t merely describe bodily sweetness; it reenacts it through sound. Contextually, this sits in Hass’s larger project of marrying lyric precision to lived, physical experience - an American pastoral stripped of innocence, where the sacred arrives not via revelation but via an afternoon that tastes right and a name you can’t stop saying.