The Apple Trees at Olema Read online

  Robert Hass

  The Apple Trees at Olema

  New and Selected Poems

  For Brenda

  Contents

  New Poems

  July Notebook: The Birds

  Sleep like the down elevator’s

  In front of me six African men, each of them tall

  They are built like exclamation points, woodpeckers.

  Are you there? It’s summer. Are you smeared with the juice of cherries?

  After Coleridge and for Milosz: Late July

  For C.R.: What do you mean you have nothing?

  Late afternoons in June the fog rides in

  August Notebook: A Death

  1. River Bicycle Peony

  2. Sudden and Grateful Memory of Mississippi John Hurt

  3. You can fall a long way in sunlight

  4. Today his body is consigned to the flames

  Variations on a Passage in Edward Abbey

  The Bus to Baekdam Temple

  Song of the Border Guard

  September Notebook: Stories

  Everyone comes from a long way off

  Driving up 80 in the haze, they talked and talked.

  Alternatively:

  He found that it was no good trying to tell

  Names for involuntary movements of the body—

  The receptionist at the hospital morgue told him

  Setup without the punchline:

  Once there were two sisters called Knock Me and Sock Me;

  “Why?” he asked. “Because she was lonely,

  It is good to sit down to birthday cake

  Stories about the distribution of wealth:

  How Eldie Got Her Name

  Punchline without the setup:

  He had known, as long as he’d known anything,

  Because she, not her sister, answered the door,

  A Ballad:

  She looked beautiful, and looked her age, too.

  Two jokes walk into a bar.

  In the other world the girls were named Eleanor and Filina,

  Some of David’s Story

  Snowy Egret

  The Red Chinese Dragon and the Shadows on Her Body in the Moonlight

  From Field Guide

  On the Coast near Sausalito

  Fall

  Maps

  Adhesive: For Earlene

  Bookbuying in the Tenderloin

  Spring

  Song

  Palo Alto: The Marshes

  Concerning the Afterlife, the Indians of Central California Had Only the Dimmest Notions

  The Nineteenth Century as a Song

  Measure

  Applications of the Doctrine

  House

  In Weather

  From Praise

  Heroic Simile

  Meditation at Lagunitas

  Sunrise

  The Yellow Bicycle

  Against Botticelli

  Like Three Fair Branches from One Root Deriv’d

  Transparent Garments

  The Image

  The Feast

  The Pure Ones

  The Garden of Delight

  Santa Lucia

  To a Reader

  The Origin of Cities

  Winter Morning in Charlottesville

  Old Dominion

  Monticello

  Emblems of a Prior Order

  Weed

  Child Naming Flowers

  Picking Blackberries with a Friend Who Has Been Reading Jacques Lacan

  The Beginning of September

  Not Going to New York: A Letter

  Songs to Survive the Summer

  From Human Wishes

  Spring Drawing

  Vintage

  Spring Rain

  Late Spring

  Rusia en 1931

  Spring Drawing 2

  Calm

  Museum

  Novella

  Churchyard

  Conversion

  Human Wishes

  Tall Windows

  The Harbor at Seattle

  Paschal Lamb

  Duck Blind

  Quartet

  A Story About the Body

  In the Bahamas

  January

  The Apple Trees at Olema

  Misery and Splendor

  Santa Lucia II

  Cuttings

  Santa Barbara Road

  Berkeley Eclogue

  Privilege of Being

  Natural Theology

  Tahoe in August

  Thin Air

  Between the Wars

  On Squaw Peak

  From Sun Under Wood

  Happiness

  Our Lady of the Snows

  Dragonflies Mating

  My Mother’s Nipples

  The Gardens of Warsaw

  Layover

  Notes on “Layover”

  The Woods in New Jersey

  Iowa City: Early April

  A Note on “Iowa City: Early April”

  Sonnet

  Faint Music

  Forty Something

  Shame: An Aria

  Regalia for a Black Hat Dancer

  Jatun Sacha

  Frida Kahlo: In the Saliva

  English: An Ode

  The Seventh Night

  Interrupted Meditation

  From Time and Materials

  Iowa, January

  After Trakl

  Envy of Other People’s Poems

  A Supple Wreath of Myrtle

  Futures in Lilacs

  Three Dawn Songs in Summer

  The Distribution of Happiness

  Etymology

  The Problem of Describing Color

  The Problem of Describing Trees

  Winged and Acid Dark

  A Swarm of Dawns, a Flock of Restless Noons

  Breach and Orison

  The World as Will and Representation

  After the Winds

  For Czesław Miłosz in Kraków

  Time and Materials

  Art and Life

  Domestic Interiors

  Twin Dolphins

  Then Time

  That Music

  Czesław Miłosz: In Memoriam

  Horace: Three Imitations

  State of the Planet

  Poem with a Cucumber in It

  Drift and Vapor (Surf Faintly)

  “…White of Forgetfulness, White of Safety”

  I Am Your Waiter Tonight and My Name Is Dmitri

  A Poem

  Bush’s War

  Pears

  The Dry Mountain Air

  First Things at the Last Minute

  Poet’s Work

  Mouth Slightly Open

  Old Movie with the Sound Turned Off

  Ezra Pound’s Proposition

  On Visiting the DMZ at Panmunjon: A Haibun

  Consciousness

  Exit, Pursued by a Sierra Meadow

  September, Inverness

  Notes and Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by Robert Hass

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  New Poems

  JULY NOTEBOOK: THE BIRDS

  Sleep like the down elevator’s

  imitation of a memory lapse.

  Then early light.

  Why were you born, voyager?

  one is not born for a reason,

  though there is a skein of causes.

  out of yellowish froth,

  cells began to divide, or so they say,

  and feed on sunlight,

  for no reason.

  After that life wanted life.

  You are awake now?

  I am awake now.
/>   In front of me six African men, each of them tall

  and handsome, all of them impeccably tailored;

  all six ordered Coca-Cola at dinner (Muslim,

  it seems, a trade delegation? diplomats?);

  the young American girl next to me

  is a veterinary assistant from DC;

  I asked her if she kept records

  or held animals. A little of both,

  she says. She ’s on her way to Stockholm.

  The young man in the window seat, also American,

  black hair not combed any time

  in recent memory, expensive Italian shirt,

  gold crucifix fastened to his earlobe,

  scarab tattooed in the soft skin

  between thumb and forefinger of his left hand,

  is reading a Portuguese phrasebook.

  A lover perhaps in Lisbon or Faro.

  There should be a phrase for this passenger tenderness,

  the flickering perceptions like the whitecaps

  later on the Neva, when the wind

  off the Gulf of Finland, roughens the surface

  of the river and spills the small petals

  of white lilacs on the gray stone

  of the embankment. Above it two black-faced gulls,

  tilted in the air, cry out sharply, and sharply.

  They are built like exclamation points, woodpeckers.

  Are you there? It’s summer. Are you smeared with the juice of cherries?

  The light this morning is touching everything,

  the grasses by the pond,

  and the wind-chivvied water,

  and the aspens on the bank, and the one white fir on its sunward side,

  and the blue house down the road

  and its white banisters which are glowing on top

  and shadowy on the underside,

  which intensifies the luster of the surfaces that face the sun

  as it does to the leaves of the aspen.

  Are you there? Maybe it would be best

  to be the shadow side of a pine needle

  on a midsummer morning

  (to be in imagination and for a while

  on a midsummer morning

  the shadow side of a pine needle).

  The sun has concentrated to a glowing point

  in the unlit bulb of the porchlight on the porch

  of the blue house down the road.

  It almost hurts to look at it.

  Are you there? Are you soaked in dreams still?

  The sky is inventing a Web site called newest azure.

  There are four kinds of birdsong outside

  and a methodical early morning saw.

  No, not a saw. It’s a boy on a scooter and the sun

  on his black helmet is concentrated to a point of glowing light.

  He isn’t death come to get us

  and he isn’t truth arriving in a black T-shirt

  chevroned up the arms in tongues of flame.

  Are you there? For some reason I’m imagining

  the small hairs on your neck, even though I know

  you are dread and the muse

  and my mortal fate and a secret.

  It’s a boy on a scooter on a summer morning.

  Did I say the light was touching everything?

  After Coleridge and for Milosz: Late July

  I didn’t go hiking with the others this morning

  on the dusty trail past the firehouse,

  past the massive, asymmetrical, vanilla-scented

  Jeffrey pine, among the spikes of buckbrush

  and the spicy sage and the gray-green ceanothus,

  listening to David’s descriptions of the terrifying

  efficiencies of a high mountain ecosystem,

  the white fir’s cost-benefit analysis

  of the usefulness of its lower limbs,

  the ants herding aphids—they store the sugars

  in the aphid’s rich excretions—on the soft green

  mesas of a mule ear leaf. I think of the old man’s

  dark study jammed with books in seven languages

  as the headquarters of his military campaign

  against nothingness. Immense egoism in it,

  of course, the narcissism of a wound,

  but actual making, actual work. one of the things

  he believed was that our poems could be better

  than our motives. So who cares why

  he wrote those lines about the hairstyle

  of his piano teacher in Wilno in the 1920s

  or the building with spumy baroque cornices

  that collapsed on her in 1942. David and the others

  would by now have reached the waterfall.

  There were things he could not have known

  as he sat beside her on the mahogany bench,

  that he could only have seen, or recomposed,

  remembering the smell of her powder,

  as a sixty-five-year-old man on another continent.

  Looking out a small window at an early spring rain:

  that, if she taught piano, she was an artistic girl,

  that she didn’t have family money, that she must have

  dreamed once of performing and discovered

  the limits of her gift and that her hair,

  piled atop her head and, thickly braided,

  wound about her beautifully shaped skull

  (which the boy with his worn sheaf of Chopin études

  would hardly have noticed) was formed

  by some bohemian elegance and raffishness

  in the style of her music-student youth, so that he,

  the poet at the outer edges of middle age,

  with what comes after that visible before him

  could think unbidden of her reddish Belle Epoque hair

  and its powdery faint odor of apricot

  that he had not noticed and of the hours

  she must have spent, thousands in a lifetime,

  tending to her braids, and think that the young,

  himself then with his duties and resentments,

  are always walking past some already perished

  dream of stylishness or beauty that survives

  or half-survives in the familiar and therefore tedious,

  therefore anonymous, outfitting of one ’s elders,

  and that her gentility would have required

  (the rain in green California may have let up

  a little and quieted to dripping in the ferns)

  the smallest rooms in the most expensive quarter

  of the city she could manage—he’d have recalled

  then rows of yellow bindings of French novels

  on her well-dusted shelves—and this was why

  he visited her in that gleaming parlor room

  on the Street of St. Peter of the Rock, and why,

  he would hear years later in a letter

  from a classmate, the stone that crushed her

  was not concrete or the local limestone,

  but pure chunks of white, carefully quarried

  Carerra marble. Something in him identified,

  must have, with the darkness he thought

  he was contending against. A child practicing

  holding its breath, as a form of power,

  a threat (but against whom? To extort

  what?). or a lover perfecting a version

  of the silent treatment from some strategy

  of anticipatory anger at the failure of love.

  So he may have had to rouse himself

  against the waste, against the vast stupidity

  and cruelty and waste and wasted pathos,

  to hear the music in which to say that he ’d noticed,

  after all the years, that her small body