The Apple Trees at Olema Read online

  rinse the cup, and put it on the shelf,

  and then you go outside or you sit down at the desk.

  You go into yourself, the sage scent rising in the heat.

  BETWEEN THE WARS

  When I ran, it rained. Late in the afternoon—

  midsummer, upstate New York, mornings I wrote,

  read Polish history, and there was a woman

  whom I thought about; outside the moody, humid

  American sublime—late in the afternoon,

  toward sundown, just as the sky was darkening,

  the light came up and redwings settled in the cattails.

  They were death’s idea of twilight, the whole notes

  of a requiem the massed clouds croaked

  above the somber fields. Lady of eyelashes,

  do you hear me? Whiteness, otter’s body,

  coolness of the morning, rubbed amber

  and the skin’s salt, do you hear me? This is Poland speaking,

  “era of the dawn of freedom,” nineteen twenty-two.

  When I ran, it rained. The blackbirds settled

  their clannish squabbles in the reeds, and light came up.

  First darkening, then light. And then pure fire.

  Where does it come from? out of the impure

  shining that rises from the soaked odor of the grass,

  the levitating, Congregational, meadow-light-at-twilight

  light that darkens the heavy-headed blossoms

  of wild carrot, out of that, out of nothing

  it boils up, pools on the horizon, fissures up,

  igniting the undersides of clouds: pink flame,

  red flame, vermilion, purple, deeper purple, dark.

  You could wring the sourness of the sumac from the air,

  the fescue sweetness from the grass, the slightly

  maniacal cicadas tuning up to tear the fabric

  of the silence into tatters, so that night,

  if it wants to, comes as a beggar to the door

  at which, if you do not offer milk and barley

  to the maimed figure of the god, your well will foul,

  your crops will wither in the fields. In the eastern marches

  children know the story that the aspen quivers

  because it failed to hide the virgin and the Child

  when Herod’s hunters were abroad. Think: night is the god

  dressed as the beggar drinking the sweet milk.

  Gray beard, thin shanks, the look in the eyes

  idiot, unbearable, the wizened mouth agape,

  like an infant’s that has cried and sucked and cried

  and paused to catch its breath. The pink nubbin

  of the nipple glistens. I’ll suckle at that breast,

  the one in the song of the muttering illumination

  of the fields before the sun goes down, before

  the black train crosses the frontier from Prussia

  into Poland in the age of the dawn of freedom.

  Fifty freight cars from America, full of medicine

  and the latest miracle, canned food.

  The war is over. There are unburied bones

  in the fields at sunup, skylarks singing,

  starved children begging chocolate on the tracks.

  ON SQUAW PEAK

  I don’t even know which sadness

  it was came up

  in me when we were walking down the road to Shirley Lake,

  the sun gleaming in snowpatches,

  the sky so blue it seemed the light’s dove

  of some pentecost of blue,

  the mimulus, yellow, delicate of petal,

  and the pale yellow cinquefoil trembling in the damp

  air above the creek,—

  and fields of lupine,

  that blue blaze of lupine, a swath of paintbrush

  sheening it, and so much of it, long meadows

  of it gathered out of the mountain air and spilling

  down ridge toward the lake it almost looked like

  in the wind. I think I must have thought

  the usual things: that the flowering season

  in these high mountain meadows is so brief, that

  the feeling, something like hilarity, of sudden

  pleasure when you first come across some tough little plant

  you knew you’d see comes because it seems—I mean

  by it the larkspur or penstemon curling

  and arching the reach of its sexual being

  up out of a little crack in granite—to say

  that human hunger has a niche up here in the light-cathedral

  of the dazzled air. I wanted to tell you

  that when the ghost-child died, the three-month dreamer

  she and I would never know, I kept feeling that

  the heaven it went to was like the inside of a store window

  on a rainy day from which you watch the blurred forms

  passing in the street. or to tell you, more terrible,

  that when she and I walked off the restlessness

  of our misery afterward in the Coast Range hills,

  we saw come out of the thicket shyly

  a pure white doe. I wanted to tell you I knew

  it was a freak of beauty like the law of averages

  that killed our child and made us know, as you had said

  that things between lovers, even of longest standing,

  can be botched in their bodies, though their wills don’t fail.

  Still later, on the beach, we watched the waves.

  No two the same size. No two in the same arch

  of rising up and pouring. But it is the same law.

  You shell a pea, there are three plump seeds and one

  that’s shriveled. You shell a bushelful and you begin

  to feel the rhythms of the waves at Limantour,

  glittering, jagged, that last bright October afternoon.

  It killed something in me, I thought, or froze it,

  to have to see where beauty comes from. I imagined

  for a long time that the baby, since

  it would have liked to smell our clothes to know

  what a mother and father would have been,

  hovered sometimes in our closet and I half-expected

  to see it there, half-fish spirit, form of tenderness,

  a little dead dreamer with open eyes. That was

  private sorrow. I tried not to hate my life,

  to fear the frame of things. I knew what two people

  couldn’t say

  on a cold November morning in the fog—

  you remember the feel of Berkeley winter mornings—

  what they couldn’t say to each other

  was the white deer not seen. It meant to me

  that beauty and terror were intertwined so powerfully

  and went so deep that any kind of love

  can fail. I didn’t say it. I think the mountain startled

  my small grief. Maybe there wasn’t time.

  We may have been sprinting to catch the tram

  because we had to teach poetry

  in that valley two thousand feet below us.

  You were running—Steven’s mother, Michael’s lover,

  mother and lover, grieving, of a girl

  about to leave for school and die to you a little

  (or die into you, or simply turn away)—

  and you ran like a gazelle,

  in purple underpants, royal purple,

  and I laughed out loud. It was the abundance

  the world gives, the more-than-you-bargained-for

  surprise of it, waves breaking,

  the sudden fragrance of the mimulus at creekside

  sharpened by the summer dust.

  Things bloom up there. They are

  for their season alive in those bright vanishings

  of the air we ran through.

  Sun Under Wood

 
Now goth sonne under wode—

  Me reweth, Marie, thi faire rode.

  Now goth sonne under tre—

  Me reweth, Marie, thy sonne and thee.

  —ANONYMOUS, TWELFTH CENTURY

  HAPPINESS

  Because yesterday morning from the steamy window

  we saw a pair of red foxes across the creek

  eating the last windfall apples in the rain—

  they looked up at us with their green eyes

  long enough to symbolize the wakefulness of living things

  and then went back to eating—

  and because this morning

  when she went into the gazebo with her black pen and yellow pad

  to coax an inquisitive soul

  from what she thinks of as the reluctance of matter,

  I drove into town to drink tea in the café

  and write notes in a journal—mist rose from the bay

  like the luminous and indefinite aspect of intention,

  and a small flock of tundra swans

  for the second winter in a row was feeding on new grass

  in the soaked fields; they symbolize mystery, I suppose,

  they are also called whistling swans, are very white,

  and their eyes are black—

  and because the tea steamed in front of me,

  and the notebook, turned to a new page,

  was blank except for a faint blue idea of order,

  I wrote: happiness! it is December, very cold,

  we woke early this morning,

  and lay in bed kissing,

  our eyes squinched up like bats.

  OUR LADY OF THE SNOWS

  In white,

  the unpainted statue of the young girl

  on the side altar

  made the quality of mercy seem scrupulous and calm.

  When my mother was in a hospital drying out,

  or drinking at a pace that would put her there soon,

  I would slip in the side door,

  light an aromatic candle,

  and bargain for us both.

  or else I’d stare into the day-moon of that face

  and, if I concentrated, fly.

  Come down! come down!

  she ’d call, because I was so high.

  Though mostly when I think of myself

  at that age, I am standing at my older brother’s closet

  studying the shirts,

  convinced that I could be absolutely transformed

  by something I could borrow.

  And the days churned by,

  navigable sorrow.

  DRAGONFLIES MATING

  1.

  The people who lived here before us

  also loved these high mountain meadows on summer mornings.

  They made their way up here in easy stages

  when heat began to dry the valleys out,

  following the berry harvest probably and the pine buds:

  climbing and making camp and gathering,

  then breaking camp and climbing and making camp and gathering.

  A few miles a day. They sent out the children

  to dig up bulbs of the mariposa lilies that they liked to roast

  at night by the fire where they sat talking about how this year

  was different from last year. Told stories,

  knew where they were on earth from the names,

  owl moon, bear moon, gooseberry moon.

  2.

  Jaime de Angulo (1934) was talking to a Channel Island Indian

  in a Santa Barbara bar. You tell me how your people said

  the world was made. Well, the guy said, Coyote was on the mountain

  and he had to pee. Wait a minute, Jaime said,

  I was talking to a Pomo the other day and he said

  Red Fox made the world. They say Red Fox, the guy shrugged,

  we say Coyote. So, he had to pee

  and he didn’t want to drown anybody, so he turned toward the place

  where the ocean would be. Wait a minute, Jaime said,

  if there were no people yet, how could he drown anybody?

  The Channelleño got a funny look on his face. You know,

  he said, when I was a kid, I wondered about tha

  and I asked my father. We were living up toward Santa Ynez.

  He was sitting on a bench in the yard shaving down fence posts

  with an ax, and I said, how come Coyote was worried about people

  when he had to pee and there were no people? The guy laughed.

  And my old man looked up at me with this funny smile

  and said, You know, when I was a kid, I wondered about that.

  3.

  Thinking about that story just now, early morning heat,

  first day in the mountains, I remembered stories about sick Indians

  and—in the same thought—standing on the free throw line.

  St. Raphael’s parish, where the northernmost of the missions

  had been, was founded as a hospital, was named for the angel

  in the scriptures who healed the blind man with a fish

  he laid across his eyes.—I wouldn’t mind being that age again,

  hearing those stories, eyes turned upward toward the young nun

  in her white, fresh-smelling, immaculately laundered robes.—

  The Franciscan priests who brought their faith in God

  across the Atlantic, brought with the baroque statues and metalwork

  crosses

  and elaborately embroidered cloaks, influenza and syphilis and the

  coughing disease.

  Which is why we settled an almost empty California.

  There were drawings in the mission museum of the long, dark wards

  full of small brown people, wasted, coughing into blankets,

  the saintly Franciscan fathers moving patiently among them.

  It would, Sister Marietta said, have broken your hearts to see it.

  They meant so well, she said, and such a terrible thing

  came here with their love. And I remembered how I hated it

  after school—because I loved basketball practice more than anything

  on earth—that I never knew if my mother was going to show up

  well into one of those weeks of drinking she disappeared into,

  and humiliate me in front of my classmates with her bright, confident eyes,

  and slurred, though carefully pronounced words, and the appalling

  impromptu sets of mismatched clothes she was given to

  when she had the dim idea of making a good impression in that state.

  Sometimes from the gym floor with its sweet, heady smell of varnish

  I’d see her in the entryway looking for me, and I’d bounce

  the ball two or three times, study the orange rim as if it were,

  which it was, the true level of the world, the one sure thing

  the power in my hands could summon. I’d bounce the ball

  once more, feel the grain of the leather in my fingertips and shoot.

  It was a perfect thing; it was almost like killing her.

  4.

  When we say “mother” in poems,

  we usually mean some wo
man in her late twenties

  or early thirties trying to raise a child.

  We use this particular noun

  to secure the pathos of the child’s point of view

  and to hold her responsible.

  5.

  If you’re afraid now?

  Fear is a teacher.

  Sometimes you thought that

  nothing could reach her,

  nothing can reach you.

  Wouldn’t you rather

  sit by the river, sit

  on the dead bank,

  deader than winter,

  where all the roots gape?

  6.

  This morning in the early sun,

  steam rising from the pond the color of smoky topaz,

  a pair of delicate, copper-red, needle-fine insects

  are mating in the unopened crown of a Shasta daisy

  just outside your door. The green flower heads look like wombs

  or the upright, supplicant bulbs of a vegetal pre-erection.

  The insect lovers seem to be transferring the cosmos into each other

  by attaching at the tail, holding utterly still, and quivering intently.

  I think (on what evidence?) that they are different from us.

  That they mate and are done with mating.

  They don’t carry all this half-mated longing up out of childhood

  and then go looking for it everywhere.

  And so, I think, they can’t wound each other the way we do.

  They don’t go through life dizzy or groggy with their hunger,

  kill with it, smear it on everything, though it is perhaps also true

  that nothing happens to them quite like what happens to us

  when the blue-backed swallow dips swiftly toward the green pond

  and the pond’s green-and-blue reflected swallow marries it a moment

  in the reflected sky and the heart goes out to the end of the rope

  it has been throwing into abyss after abyss, and a singing shimmers

  from every color the morning has risen into.

  My insect instructors have stilled, they are probably stuck together