The Apple Trees at Olema Read online

  She was sitting beside me and I looked at her hands

  in her lap. Her beautiful hands. And I thought about

  the way she was carrying the whole of the world’s violence

  and cruelty in her body, or trying to, because

  she thought the rest of us couldn’t or wouldn’t.

  our friend was bowing away, a series of high, sweet,

  climbing and keening notes, and that line of Eliot’s

  from The Wasteland came into my head:

  ‘This music crept by me upon the waters.’”

  SNOWY EGRET

  A boy walks out in the morning with a gun.

  Bright air, the smell of grass and leaves

  and reeds around the pond October smells.

  A scent of apples from the orchard in the air.

  A smell of ducks. Two cinnamon teal,

  he thinks they are teal, the ones he’d seen

  the night before as the pond darkened

  and he’d thought the thought that the dark

  was coming earlier. He is of an age

  when the thought of winter is a sexual thought,

  the having thoughts of one’s own is sexual,

  the two ducks muttering and gliding

  toward the deeper reeds away from him,

  as if distance were a natural courtesy,

  is sexual, which is to say, a mystery, an ache

  inside his belly and his chest that rhymes

  somehow with the largeness of the night.

  The stars conjuring themselves from nothing

  but the dark, as if to say it’s not as if

  they weren’t all along just where they were,

  ached in the suddenly swifter darkening

  and glittering and cold. He’s of an age

  when the thought of thinking is, at night,

  a sexual thought. This morning in the crystal

  of the air, dew, and the sunlight that the dew

  has caught on the grass blades sparkling at his feet,

  he stalks the pond. Three larger ducks,

  mallards probably, burst from the reeds

  and wheel and fly off south. Three redwings,

  gone to their winter muteness, fly three ways

  across the pond to settle on three cattails

  opposite or crossways from each other,

  perch and shiver into place and look around.

  That’s when he sees the snowy egret

  in the rushes, pure white and stone still

  and standing on one leg in that immobile,

  perfect, almost princely way. He ’d seen it

  often in the summer, often in the morning

  and sometimes at dusk, hunting the reeds

  under the sumac shadows on the far bank.

  He’d watched the slow, wide fanning

  of its wings, taking off and landing,

  the almost inconceivably slow way

  it raised one leg and then another

  when it was stalking, the quick cocking

  of its head at sudden movement in the water,

  and the swift, darting sureness when it stabbed

  the water for a stickleback or frog. once

  he’d seen it, head up, swallowing a gopher,

  its throat bulging, a bit of tail and a trickle

  of blood just visible below the black beak.

  Now it was still and white in the brightness

  of the morning in the reeds. He liked

  to practice stalking, and he raised the gun

  to his shoulder and crouched in the wet grasses

  and drew his bead just playfully at first.

  THE RED CHINESE DRAGON AND THE SHADOWS ON HER BODY IN THE MOONLIGHT

  L. had returned from a visit to the town

  where he had lived for many years

  with the wife and in the marriage he was leaving.

  His task was to walk through the house

  and mark things of his for the movers

  (he ’d taken a job in another town)

  and those of their common possessions

  they had agreed he would take with him

  into the new life. His wife had said,

  “Take what you want,” and he understood

  that she meant by this to say to him

  that things were not the cause of her anger

  or her hurt. His son, who was a senior

  in high school, was also angry

  and protective of his mother, who was,

  after all, the one being abandoned.

  L. understood that. He even thought

  that his son’s loyalty to his mother

  was a good thing up to a point. The son,

  when he’d heard the news, had acted as if

  he’d been kicked in the stomach, then flared

  and accused his father of selfishness,

  of breaking up the family over personal feelings,

  but he had also, like young men of his generation,

  been raised a feminist and he had made himself

  face the fact that, if his mother had a right

  to her own life, like Nora in the Ibsen play

  his drama class had performed the year before,

  so did his father, and that he had to tell him so,

  which he did, a week later, and on the phone,

  a call L. would also associate with the unreal blue

  of the mounded snow outside his new office

  with its weather of another world. He arrived

  on a Friday afternoon and stayed at a hotel

  in the center of town. It was an odd sensation,

  and not unpleasant, like the lightness

  he had been feeling intermittently since

  he’d left some months before, alongside

  the heavy & incessant grief. He spent an hour

  in his old gym, watching Iraqi women

  in black shawls howling over their dead

  on TV while he ran between two young women

  on treadmills, and thought, as he often thought

  those days, of the incommensurability

  of kinds of suffering, and afterward,

  he walked across the street to a shop

  where he ’d sometimes found interesting objects.

  There was an old red Chinese dragon

  in the window, spangled with yellow

  and green, the paint chipped but unfaded,

  some kind of water god, he thought,

  or river god that saved you from drowning

  or caused you to drown, he couldn’t

  remember which. on its face there was

  an expression of glee, ferocious glee.

  He considered buying it as a gift

  for his son and decided it was not

  a time to touch symbolism he didn’t

  understand. That night, as planned, he saw his son

  in The Tempest. He ’d sat alone near the back

  of the theater and tried not to feel anything

  except pleasure in the children and the play,

  in which his son’s girlfriend had the part of Miranda

  to his Prospero. She was a gamin-faced girl,

  wide-browed with ash blond hair, who more than a little

  resembled L.’s wife (something they had both remarked,

  amused, a year before) and who brought the house down

  with Miranda’s line. The audience, L. thought,

  in a university town mostly knew it was coming,

  but when she stood, flower-bedecked, center stage,

  and lifted herself on tiptoe as she said it

  in a slightly hoarse and boyish voice, the audience

  howled with delight. Afterward they also murmured

  audibly when his son, also center stage, adorable

  and a little ludicrous in his wispy wizard’s beard,

  intoned his line, held out a wooden wand between his hands,

  and broke it
with a loud snap to abjure the magic.

  L.’s wife sat in the middle of the second row.

  He watched her greet many of their casual friends,

  colleagues, parents of their son’s friends

  he’d sat in the back to avoid having to greet.

  He’d brought flowers, and seeing that his wife had, too,

  he decided to leave his under his seat. He waved

  at his son, unbearded now and milling on stage

  with the rest of the cast, gave him a thumbs up,

  and drove his rental car back to the hotel.

  In the morning, at ten, they’d gone through the house.

  His son had answered the door, the three of them

  had coffee in the kitchen and talked about the play.

  His wife said not much and he concentrated

  on ignoring her anger and the devastating sorrow

  welling up inside him. Going through the house,

  they’d had no issues except for one bowl

  that they’d both remembered being the one

  to spot in an antique store on the Mendocino road

  twenty years before when they were quite poor

  and the bowl, earthy, a luminous brown-gold,

  from a famous ceramist’s studio in Cornwall,

  had been a plunge. (They’d made love

  in the upstairs room of a bed-and-breakfast,

  he involuntarily remembered, with an ocean view

  and at breakfast they had heard Pachelbel’s canon

  for the first time with its stunned, slow, stately beauty

  and went walking to look for coastal flowers,

  lupine and heal-all and vetch, to fill the bowl with,

  and then somehow bickered away through the afternoon

  while they walked on the storm-littered beach.)

  His wife looked at it a long time, arms crossed,

  and then shrugged forcefully as if to say, take it

  if you want it, since you’ve taken everything else,

  and so, nettled by what he thought

  was passive-aggressive in her manner, he had.

  Later he found there wasn’t a way to describe

  to his lover or to his friends the moment

  when he turned to his wife to say, again,

  how sorry he was, and how she had seen it

  coming and raised a palm and said, “Please, don’t,”

  and how his son had walked him to the door

  and how, sitting in the car outside his house

  of many years while his son disappeared inside,

  he’d felt unable to move, stuck in some deep well

  of dry sorrow, staring at the cold early blossoms

  of the plum trees and at the carelessly lovely look

  of the gardens his neighbors had, in the West Coast way,

  labored over, until shame made him start the car

  and drive it to the airport. Home again, in his new apartment

  on the other side of the continent, fumbling

  for his key in the humid night, he almost tripped

  over the cat that came bounding out of the shadows

  to greet him. It belonged to his new neighbor,

  a professor of philosophy who’d written a book

  about lying which he had tried to read

  when he was sorting out the evasions and outright lies

  his infidelity entailed. The cat was named Cat

  and it was blind. It was rubbing its gray flank

  against his ankles and purring, looking up at him

  and purring and winking its occluded, milky eyes.

  She opened the door before he did. She had put on

  one of his shirts and was warm and smelled of sleep.

  He scooped up the cat and tossed it in the hall

  And then he hugged her. When she asked him, only half-awake,

  how it had gone, he ’d said, “Fine. Not easy.”

  and she had touched his cheek and said, “Poor baby”

  and padded down the hall and back to bed.

  A few nights later, after they’d made love,

  he dozed and woke thinking about his son.

  They had tossed off the sheets in the warm room

  and when he glanced aside he was startled

  to see that her body, curled naked beside him,

  lustrous in the moonlight, was crisscrossed

  with black shadows from the blinds. His body too.

  It made them, made everything, seem vulnerable.

  There was a light still on in the kitchen, and he slipped

  from bed and walked down the hall to turn it off.

  They’d also left the TV on, soldiers in desert camouflage

  leaning against a wall. He turned that off, too,

  and walked back down the hall, climbed into bed,

  covered them both, lay down, and listened to the rhythm

  of her breathing. After a while he entered it and slept.

  Field Guide

  ON THE COAST NEAR SAUSALITO

  1.

  I won’t say much for the sea,

  except that it was, almost,

  the color of sour milk.

  The sun in that clear

  unmenacing sky was low,

  angled off the gray fissure of the cliffs,

  hills dark green with manzanita.

  Low tide: slimed rocks

  mottled brown and thick with kelp

  merged with the gray stone

  of the breakwater, sliding off

  to antediluvian depths.

  The old story: here filthy life begins.

  2.

  Fish—

  ing, as Melville said,

  “to purge the spleen,”

  to put to task my clumsy hands

  my hands that bruise by

  not touching

  pluck the legs from a prawn,

  peel the shell off,

  and curl the body twice about a hook.

  3.

  The cabezone is not highly regarded

  by fishermen, except Italians

  who have the grace

  to fry the pale, almost bluish flesh

  in olive oil with a sprig

  of fresh rosemary.

  The cabezone, an ugly atavistic fish,

  as old as the coastal shelf

  it feeds upon

  has fins of duck’s-web thickness,

  resembles a prehistoric toad,

  and is delicately sweet.

  Catching one, the fierce quiver of surprise

  and the line ’s tension

  are a recognition.

  4.

  But it’s strange to kill

  for the sudden feel of life.

  The danger is

  to moralize

  that strangeness.

  Holding the spiny monster in my hands

  his bulging purple eyes

  were eyes and the sun was

  almost tangent to the planet

  on our uneasy coast.

  Creature and creature,

  we stared down centuries.

  FALL

  Amateurs, we gathered mushrooms

  near shaggy eucalyptus groves

  which smelled of camphor and the fog-soaked earth.

  Chanterelles, puffballs, chicken of the woods,

  we cooked in wine or butter,

  beaten eggs or sour cream,

  half-expecting to be

  killed by a mistake. “Intense perspiration,”

  you said late at night,

  quoting the terrifying field guide

  while we lay tangled in our sheets and heavy limbs,

  “is the first symptom of attack.”

  Friends called our aromatic fungi

  liebestoads and only ate the ones

  that we most certainly survived.

  Death shook us more than once

  those days and floating back

  it felt l
ike life. Earth-wet, slithery,

  we drifted toward the names of things.

  Spore prints littered our table

  like nervous stars. Rotting caps

  gave off a musky smell of loam.

  MAPS

  Sourdough French bread and pinot chardonnay

  Apricots—

  the downy buttock shape

  hard black sculpture of the limbs

  on Saratoga hillsides in the rain.

  These were the staples of the China trade:

  sea otter, sandalwood, and bêche-de-mer

  The pointillist look of laurels

  their dappled pale green body stirs

  down valley in the morning wind

  Daphne was supple

  my wife is tan, blue-rippled

  pale in the dark hollows

  Kit Carson in California:

  it was the eyes of fish

  that shivered in him the tenderness of eyes

  he watched the ships come in

  at Yerba Buena once, found obscene

  the intelligence of crabs

  their sidelong crawl, gulls

  screeching for white meat,

  flounders in tubs, startled

  Musky fall—

  slime of a saffron milkcap

  the mottled amanita

  delicate phallic toxic

  How odd

  the fruity warmth of zinfandel

  geometries of “rational viticulture”

  Plucked from algae sea spray

  cold sun and a low rank tide

  sea cucumbers

  lolling in the crevices of rock

  they traded men enough

  to carve old Crocker’s railway out of rock

  to eat these slugs

  bêche-de-mer

  The night they bombed Hanoi

  we had been drinking red pinot

  that was winter the walnut tree was bare

  and the desert ironwood where waxwings

  perched in spring drunk on pyracantha

  squalls headwinds days gone

  north on the infelicitous Pacific

  The bleak intricate erosion of these cliffs

  seas grown bitter

  with the salt of continents

  Jerusalem artichokes

  raised on sandy bluffs at San Gregorio

  near reedy beaches where the steelhead ran

  Coast range runoff turned salt creek

  in the heat and indolence of August

  That purple in the hills