The Apple Trees at Olema Read online

  fennel grew high and green

  in early summer, and the air

  smelled like little anise-scented loaves

  in the Italian restaurants her father

  used to take them to on Sunday nights.

  She had to sit up straight:

  it was the idea of family

  they failed at. She lights a cigarette,

  remembering the taut veins

  in her mother’s neck, how she had studied them,

  repelled. He has begun to drowse:

  backyards, her voice, dusty fennel,

  the festering sweetness of the plums.

  Monday Morning, Late Summer

  on the fence

  in the sunlight,

  beach towels.

  No wind.

  The apricots have ripened

  and been picked.

  The blackberries have ripened

  and been picked.

  So

  They walked along the dry gully.

  Cottonwoods, so the river must be underground.

  Plus Which

  She turned to him. or, alternatively,

  she turned away. Doves let loose

  above the sea, or the sea at night

  beating on the pylons of a bridge.

  off-season: the candles were Mediterranean,

  opaque, and the cat cried olor,

  olor, olor in the blue susurrations

  of heather by the outhouse door.

  SANTA BARBARA ROAD

  Mornings on the south side of the house

  just outside the kitchen door

  arrived early in summer—

  when Luke was four or five

  he would go out there, still in his dandelion-

  yellow pajamas on May mornings

  and lie down on the first warm stone.

  For years, when the green nubs of apricots

  first sprouted on the backyard tree,

  I thought about a bench in that spot,

  a redwood screen behind green brushstrokes

  of bamboo, and one April, walking into the kitchen,

  I felt like a stranger to my life

  and it scared me, so when the gray doves returned

  to the telephone wires

  and the lemons were yellowing

  and no other task presented itself,

  I finally went into the garden and started

  digging, trying to marry myself

  and my hands to that place.

  Household verses: “Who are you?”

  the rubber duck in my hand asked Kristin

  once, while she was bathing, three years old.

  “Kristin,” she said, laughing, her delicious

  name, delicious self. “That’s just your name,”

  the duck said. “Who are you?” “Kristin,”

  she said. “Kristin’s a name. Who are you?”

  the duck asked. She said, shrugging,

  “Mommy, Daddy, Leif.”

  The valley behind the hills heats up,

  vultures, red-tailed hawks floating in the bubbles

  of warm air that pull the fog right in

  from the ocean. You have to rise at sunup

  to see it steaming through the Gate

  in ghostly June. Later, on street corners,

  you can hardly see the children, chirping

  and shivering, each shrill voice climbing over

  the next in an ascending chorus. “Wait, you guys,”

  one little girl says, trying to be heard.

  “Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.”

  Bright clothes: the last buses of the term.

  Richard arrives to read poems, the final guest

  of a long spring. I thought of Little Shelford,

  where we had seen him last. In the worked gold

  of an English October, Kristin watched the neighbor’s

  horses wading in the meadow grass, while Leif

  and I spiraled a football by the chalk-green,

  moss-mortared ruin of the garden wall.

  Mr. Acker, who had worked in the village

  since he was a boy, touched his tweed cap

  mournfully. “Reminds me of the war,” he said.

  “Lots of Yanks here then.” Richard rolled a ball

  to Luke, who had an old alphabet book

  in which cherubic animals disported.

  Richard was a rabbit with a roller.

  Luke evidently thought that it was droll

  or magical that Richard, commanded

  by the power of the word, was crouching

  under the horse chestnut, dangling

  a hand-rolled cigarette and rolling him a ball.

  He gave me secret, signifying winks, though

  he could not quite close one eye at a time.

  So many prisms to construct a moment!

  Spiderwebs set at all angles on a hedge:

  what Luke thought was going on, what Mr. Acker

  saw, and Richard, who had recently divorced,

  idly rolling a ball with someone else ’s child,

  healing slowly, as the neighbor’s silky mare

  who had had a hard birth in the early spring,

  stood quiet in the field as May grew sweet,

  her torn vagina healing. So many visions

  intersecting at what we call the crystal

  of a common world, all the growing and shearing,

  all the violent breaks. on Richard’s last night

  in Berkeley, we drank late and drove home

  through the city gardens in the hills. Light

  glimmered on the bay. Night-blooming jasmine

  gave a heavy fragrance to the air. Richard

  studied the moonlit azaleas in silence.

  I knew he had a flat in East London.

  I wondered if he was envying my life.

  “How did you ever get stuck in this nest

  of gentlefolk?” he said. “Christ! It’s lovely.

  I shouldn’t want to live in America.

  I’d miss the despair of European men.”

  Luke comes running into the house excited

  to say that an Iceland poppy has “bloomed up.”

  His parents, who are not getting along

  especially well, exchange wry looks.

  They had both forgotten, since small children

  were supposed to love flowers, that they actually

  do. And there is the pathos of the metaphor

  or myth: irresistible flowering.

  Everything rises from the dead in June.

  There is some treasure hidden in the heart of summer

  everyone remembers now, and they can’t be sure

  the lives they live in will discover it.

  They remember the smells of childhood vacations.

  The men buy maps, raffish hats. Some women

  pray to it by wearing blouses

  with small buttons you have to button patiently,

  as if to say, this is not winter, not

  the cold shudder of dressing in the dark.

  Howard, one child on his shoulder,

  another trotting beside him, small hand

  in his hand, is going to write a book—

  “Miranda, stop pulling Daddy’s hair”—about

  the invention of the family in medieval France.

  The ritual hikes of Memorial Day: adults

  chatting in constantly re-forming groups,

  men with men, women with women, couples,

  children cozened along with orange sections

  and with raisins, running ahead, and back,

  and interrupting. Long views through mist

  of the scaly brightness of the ocean,

  the massive palisade of Point Reyes cliffs.

  “I would have thought,” a woman friend says,

  peeling a tangerine for Howard whose hands

  are otherwise employed, cautioning a child

  to spit out all the
seeds, “that biology

  invented the family.” A sudden upward turn

  of the trail, islands just on the horizon,

  blue. “Well,” he says, “I think it’s useful

  to see it as a set of conventions.”

  Someone’s great-aunt dies. Someone’s sister’s

  getting married in a week. The details are comic.

  But we dress, play flutes, twine flowers,

  and read long swatches from the Song of Songs

  to celebrate some subtle alteration

  in a cohabitation that has, probably, reached a crisis

  and solved it with the old idea of these vows.

  To vow, and tear down time: one of the lovers gives up

  an apartment, returned to and stripped piecemeal

  over months or years, until one maidenhair fern

  left by the kitchen window as a symbol, dwindling,

  of the resilience of a solitary life

  required watering. Now it too is moved.

  Summer solstice: parents, if their children

  are young enough, put them to bed before dark,

  then sit to watch the sun set on the bay.

  A woman brings her coffee to the view.

  Dinner done. What was she thinking

  before her mother called, before the neighbor

  called about the car pool? Something,

  something interesting. The fog flares

  and smolders, salmon first, then rose,

  and in the twilight the sound comes up

  across the neighborhood backyards of a table

  being set. other lives with other schedules.

  Then dark, and, veering eerily, a bat.

  Body half-emerged from the bright blue cocoon

  of the sleeping bag, he wakes, curled hand

  curling toward the waves of his sister’s

  cut-short, slept-on and matted, cornfield-

  colored hair. She stirs a little in her sleep.

  Her mother, whose curved brow her brow exactly

  echoes, stirs. What if the gnostics had it backward?

  What if eternity is pure destruction? The child,

  rubbing his eyes, stares drowsily at the sea,

  squints at his father who is sitting up,

  shivers from his bag, plods up the beach

  to pee against the cliff, runs back, climbs in

  with his mother, wriggles close. In a minute

  he’ll be up again, fetching driftwood for a fire.

  Leif comes home from the last day of his sophomore year.

  I am sitting on the stoop by our half-dug,

  still-imagined kitchen porch, reading

  Han dynasty rhyme-prose. He puts a hand on my shoulder,

  grown to exactly my height and still growing.

  “Dad,” he says, “I’m not taking any more

  of this tyrannical bullshit.” I read to him

  from Chia Ya: The great man is without bent,

  a million changes are as one to him.

  He says, “And another thing, don’t lay

  your Buddhist trips on me.” The span of life is fated;

  man cannot guess its ending.

  In stillness like the stillness of deep springs…

  In the kitchen he flips the lid

  of the blueberry yogurt. I am thinking

  this project is more work than I want.

  Joining, scattering, ebbing and flowing,

  where is there persistence, where is there rule?

  “Bullshit,” he mutters, “what is the existential reality”—

  he has just read Nausea in advanced English—

  “of all this bullshit, Todo?”

  Todo is the dog. It occurs to me

  that I am not a very satisfying parent

  to rebel against. Like an unmoored boat

  drifting aimlessly, not even valuing

  the breath of life, the wise man

  embraces nothing, and drifts with it .

  I look at his long body in a chair

  and wonder if I’d tell him to embrace the void.

  I think he will embrace a lover soon.

  I want the stars to terrify him once. I want him

  to weep bitterly when his grandfather dies,

  hating the floral carpet, hating it that his old aunts

  have become expert at this event.

  I would ward off, if I could, the thicket

  of grief on grief in which Chia Ya

  came to entire relinquishment as to a clearing.

  Digging again, I say, “You know, I started this job

  and I hate it already, and now I have to finish.”

  He leans against the doorpost with a spoon.

  Takes a mouthful. “Well, Pop,” he says, “that’s life.”

  Children stroll down to the lakeside

  on a path already hot from the morning sun

  and known well by them in its three turnings—

  one by the sugar pine gouged with rusty nails

  where summers past they put a hammock or a swing,

  one by the thimbleberry where the walk seems driest,

  dust heaviest on the broad soft leaves, and bees—

  you have to be careful—are nuzzling in the flowers,

  one by the aspens where the smell of water

  starts and the path opens onto sand, the wide blue lake,

  mountains on the farther shore. The smaller boy

  has line, a can for crawfish, and an inner tube.

  He’s nursing a summer cold. His older brother’s

  carrying a book, a towel, a paper on Medea

  his girlfriend has mailed to him from summer school.

  The girl has several books, some magazines.

  She loves her family, but she ’s bored. She ’d rather

  be in town where her friends are, where her real life

  has begun. They settle on the beach.

  Cold water, hot sun, the whole of an afternoon.

  BERKELEY ECLOGUE

  1.

  Sunlight on the streets in afternoon

  and shadows on the faces in the open-air cafés.

  What for? Wrong question. You knock

  without knowing that you knocked. The door

  opens on a century of clouds and centuries

  of centuries of clouds. The bird sings

  among the toyons in the spring’s diligence

  of rain. And then what? Hand on your heart.

  Would you die for spring? What would you die for?

  Anything?

  Anything. It may be I can’t find it

  and they can, the spooners of whipped cream

  and espresso at the sunny tables, the women

  with their children in the stores. You want to sing?

  Tra-la. Empty and he wants to sing.

  A pretty river, but there were no fish.

  Smart fish. They will be feeding for a while.

  He wants to sing. Yes, poverty or death.

  Piety or death, you meant, you dope. You fool,

  “bloody little fool.” She slammed the door.

  He was, of course, forlorn. And lorn and afterlorn.

  It made a busy afternoon. The nights were difficult.

  No doors, no drama. The moon ached aimlessly.

  Dogs in the morning had their dog masks on.

  It did not seem good, the moths, the apples?

  The gold meander in her long brown hair

  cast one vote then, sinuous as wrists. He attended

  to her earnestness as well—and the child liked breakfast.

  He believed in that. Every day was a present

  he pretended that he brought. The sun came up.

  Nothing to it. I’ll do it again tomorrow,

  and it did. Sundays he fetched croissants,

  the frank nipples of brioche that say it’s day,

  eat up, the phone will ring, the mail arrive.

  Someone who
heard you sing the moths, the apples

  and they were—for sure they were, and good

  though over there. Gold hair. A lucky guy

  with a head on his shoulders, and all heart.

  You can skip this part. The moths, the apples,

  and the morning news. Apartheid, terror,

  boys in a jungle swagging guns. Injustice

  in tropical climates is appalling,

  and it does do you credit to think so.

  I knew that I had my own work to do.

  The ones who wear the boots decide all that.

  He wants to sing one thing so true that it is true.

  I cast a vote across the river, skipped another

  on the pond. It skittered for a while triumphantly,

  then sank. And we were naked on the riverbank.

  I believed a little in her breasts, the color

  of the aureoles that afternoon, and something

  she said about her sister that seemed shrewd.

  Afterward we watched a woman making masks,

  mostly with feathers and a plaster cast of face

  she glued them to. The mouths formed cries.

  They were the parts that weren’t there—implied

  by what surrounded them. They were a cunning

  emptiness. I think you ought to start again.

  The fish were smart. They mouthed the salmon eggs,

  or so you felt. The boys kept reeling in.

  Casting and reeling in. You’ll never catch a fish

  that way, you said. one caught a fish that way.

  one perched in a chair abandoned on the sand.

  Drank orange soda, watched his rod twitter

  in the fork of a willow twig. “I’m getting a bite, Dad.”

  It was the river current or the wind. In every

  language in the world, I bet. Do you believe

  in that? Not especially. It means the race is old.

  And full of hope? He wants to sing.

  You bastard, she said, and slammed the door.

  You’ve been in this part already. Say “before.”

  “Before.” She shut the door. It couldn’t have been

  otherwise. How sick you were. The mouths, the apples,

  the buttons on a blouse. The bone was like pearl,

  and small, and very shiny. The fat child’s face

  was flecked with Santa Rosa plum. She cried.

  Her mother hit her. Then it seemed like blood.

  A flood of tears, then. You remembered

  never to interfere. It humiliates them.

  They beat the child again when they get home.