The Apple Trees at Olema Read online

owl’s clover stiffening the lupine

  while the white flowers of the pollinated plant

  seep red

  the eye owns what is familiar

  felt along the flesh

  “an amethystine tinge”

  Chants, recitations:

  Olema

  Tamalpais Mariposa

  Mendocino Sausalito San Rafael

  Emigrant Gap

  Donner Pass

  of all the laws

  that bind us to the past

  the names of things are

  stubbornest

  Late summer—

  red berries darken the hawthorns

  curls of yellow in the laurels

  your body and the undulant

  sharp edges of the hills

  Clams, abalones, cockles, chitons, crabs

  Ishi

  in San Francisco, 1911:

  it was not the sea he wondered at

  that inland man who saw the salmon

  die to spawn and fed his dwindling people

  from their rage to breed

  it was the thousands of white bodies

  on the beach

  “Hansi saltu…” so many

  ghosts

  The long ripple in the swamp grass

  is a skunk

  he shuns the day

  ADHESIVE: FOR EARLENE

  How often we overslept

  those gray enormous mornings

  in the first year of marriage

  and found that rain and wind

  had scattered palm nuts,

  palm leaves, and sweet rotting crab apples

  across our wildered lawn.

  By spring your belly was immense

  and your coloring a high rosy almond.

  We were so broke

  we debated buying thumbtacks

  at the Elmwood Dime Store

  knowing cellophane tape would do.

  Berkeley seemed more innocent

  in those flush days

  when we skipped lunch

  to have the price of Les Enfants du Paradis.

  BOOKBUYING IN THE TENDERLOIN

  A statuary Christ bleeds sweating grief

  in the Gethsemane garden of St. Boniface Church

  where empurpled Irish winos lurch

  to their salvation. When incense and belief

  will not suffice: ruby port in the storm

  of muscatel-made images of hell

  the city spews at their shuffling feet.

  In the Longshoreman’s Hall across the street,

  three decades have unloaded since the fight

  to oust the manic Trotskyite

  screwballs from the brotherhood. All goes well

  since the unions closed their ranks,

  boosted their pensions, and hired the banks

  to manage funds for the workingman’s cartel.

  Christ in plaster, the unions minting coin,

  old hopes converge upon the Tenderloin

  where Comte, Considérant, Fourier

  are thick with dust in the two-bit tray

  of cavernous secondhand bookstores

  and the streets suffuse the ten-cent howl

  of jukebox violence, just this side of blues.

  Negro boy-whores in black tennis shoes

  prowl in front of noisy hustler bars.

  Like Samuel Gompers, they want more

  on this street where every other whore

  is painfully skinny, wears a bouffant,

  and looks like a brown slow-blooming annual flower.

  In the places that I haunt, no power

  to transform the universal squalor

  nor wisdom to withstand the thin wrists

  of the girls who sell their bodies for a dollar

  or two, the price of a Collected Maeterlinck.

  The sky glowers. My God, it is a test,

  this riding out the dying of the West.

  SPRING

  We bought great ornamental oranges,

  Mexican cookies, a fragrant yellow tea.

  Browsed the bookstores. You

  asked mildly, “Bob, who is Ugo Betti?”

  A bearded birdlike man

  (he looked like a Russian priest

  with imperial bearing

  and a black ransacked raincoat)

  turned to us, cleared

  his cultural throat, and

  told us both interminably

  who Ugo Betti was. The slow

  filtering of sun through windows

  glazed to gold the silky hair

  along your arms. Dusk was

  a huge weird phosphorescent beast

  dying slowly out across the bay.

  our house waited and our books,

  the skinny little soldiers on the shelves.

  After dinner I read one anyway.

  You chanted, “Ugo Betti has no bones,”

  and when I said, “The limits of my language

  are the limits of my world,” you laughed.

  We spoke all night in tongues,

  in fingertips, in teeth.

  SONG

  Afternoon cooking in the fall sun—

  who is more naked

  than the man

  yelling, “Hey, I’m home!”

  to an empty house?

  thinking because the bay is clear,

  the hills in yellow heat,

  & scrub oak red in gullies

  that great crowds of family

  should tumble from the rooms

  to throw their bodies on the Papa-body,

  I-am-loved.

  Cat sleeps in the windowgleam,

  dust motes.

  on the oak table

  filets of sole

  stewing in the juice of tangerines,

  slices of green pepper

  on a bone-white dish.

  PALO ALTO: THE MARSHES

  For Mariana Richardson (1830–1891)

  1.

  She dreamed along the beaches of this coast.

  Here where the tide rides in to desolate

  the sluggish margins of the bay,

  sea grass sheens copper into distances.

  Walking, I recite the hard

  explosive names of birds:

  egret, killdeer, bittern, tern.

  Dull in the wind and early morning light,

  the striped shadows of the cattails

  twitch like nerves.

  2.

  Mud, roots, old cartridges, and blood.

  High overhead, the long silence of the geese.

  3.

  “We take no prisoners,” John Frémont said

  and took California for President Polk.

  That was the Bear Flag War.

  She watched it from the Mission San Rafael,

  named for the archangel (the terrible one)

  who gently laid a fish across the eyes

  of saintly, miserable Tobias

  that he might see.

  The eyes of fish. The land

  shimmers fearfully.

  No archangels here, no ghosts,

  and terns rise like seafoam

  from the breaking surf.

  4.

  Kit Carson’s antique .45, blue,

  new as grease. The roar

  flings up echoes,

  row on row of shrieking avocets.

  The blood of Francisco de Haro,

  Ramón de Haro, José de los Reyes Berryessa

  runs darkly to the old ooze.

  5.

  The star thistles: erect, surprised,

  6.

  and blooming

  violet caterpillar hairs. one

  of the de Haros was her lover,

  the books don’t say which.

  They were twins.

  7.

  In California in the early spring

  there are pale yellow mornings

  when the mist burns slowly into day.

  The air stings

  like
autumn, clarifies

  like pain.

  8.

  Well I have dreamed this coast myself.

  Dreamed Mariana, since her father owned the land

  where I grew up. I saw her picture once:

  a wraith encased in a high-necked black silk

  dress so taut about the bones there were hardly ripples

  for the light to play in. I knew her eyes

  had watched the hills seep blue with lupine after rain,

  seen the young peppers, heavy and intent,

  first rosy drupes and then the acrid fruit,

  the ache of spring. Black as her hair

  the unreflecting venom of those eyes

  is an aftermath I know, like these brackish,

  russet pools a strange life feeds in

  or the old fury of land grants, maps,

  and deeds of trust. A furious dun-

  colored mallard knows my kind

  and skims across the edges of the marsh

  where the dead bass surface

  and their flaccid bellies bob.

  9.

  A chill tightens the skin

  around my bones. The other California

  and its bitter absent ghosts

  dance to a stillness in the air:

  the Klamath tribe was routed and they disappeared.

  Even the dust seemed stunned,

  tools on the ground, fishnets.

  Fires crackled, smouldering.

  No movement but the slow turning

  of the smoke, no sounds but jays

  shrill in the distance and flying further off.

  The flicker of lizards, dragonflies.

  And beyond the dry flag-woven lodges

  a faint persistent slapping.

  Carson found ten wagonloads

  of fresh-caught salmon, silver

  in the sun. The flat eyes stared.

  Gills sucking the thin annulling air.

  They flopped and shivered,

  ten wagonloads. Kit Carson

  burned the village to the ground.

  They rode some twenty miles that day

  and still they saw the black smoke

  smear the sky above the pines.

  10.

  Here everything seems clear,

  firmly etched against the pale

  smoky sky: sedge, flag, owl’s clover,

  rotting wharves. A tanker lugs silver

  bomb-shaped napalm tins toward

  port at Redwood City. Again,

  my eye performs

  the lobotomy of description.

  Again, almost with yearning,

  I see the malice of her ancient eyes.

  The mud flats hiss as the tide turns.

  They say she died in Redwood City,

  cursing “the goddammed Anglo-Yankee yoke.”

  11.

  The otters are gone from the bay

  and I have seen five horses

  easy in the grassy marsh

  beside three snowy egrets.

  Bird cries and the unembittered sun,

  wings and the white bodies of the birds,

  it is morning. Citizens are rising

  to murder in their moral dreams.

  CONCERNING THE AFTERLIFE, THE INDIANS OF CENTRAL CALIFORNIA HAD ONLY THE DIMMEST NOTIONS

  It is morning because the sun has risen.

  I wake slowly in the early heat,

  pick berries from the thorny vines.

  They are deep red,

  sugar-heavy, fuzzed with dust.

  The eucalyptus casts a feathered shadow

  on the house, which gradually withdraws.

  After breakfast

  you will swim and I am going to read

  that hard man Thomas Hobbes

  on the causes of the English civil wars.

  There are no women in his world,

  Hobbes, brothers fighting brothers

  over goods.

  I see you in the later afternoon

  your hair dry-yellow, plaited

  from the waves, a faint salt sheen

  across your belly and along your arms.

  The kids bring from the sea

  intricate calcium gifts—

  black turbans, angular green whelks,

  the whorled opalescent unicorn.

  We may or may not

  feel some irritation at the dinner hour.

  The first stars, and after dark

  Vega hangs in the lyre,

  the Dipper tilts above the hill.

  Traveling

  in Europe Hobbes was haunted by motion.

  Sailing or riding, he was suddenly aware

  that all things move.

  We will lie down,

  finally, in our heaviness

  and touch and drift toward morning.

  THE NINETEENTH CENTURY AS A SONG

  “How like a well-kept garden is your soul.”

  John Gray’s translation of Verlaine

  & Baudelaire’s butcher in 1861

  shorted him four centimes

  on a pound of tripe.

  He thought himself a clever man

  and, wiping the calves’ blood from his beefy hands,

  gazed briefly at what Tennyson called

  “the sweet blue sky.”

  It was a warm day.

  What clouds there were

  were made of sugar tinged with blood.

  They shed, faintly, amid the clatter of carriages

  new settings of the songs

  Moravian virgins sang on wedding days.

  The poet is a monarch of the clouds

  & Swinburne on his northern coast

  “trod,” he actually wrote, “by no tropic foot,”

  composed that lovely elegy

  and then found out Baudelaire was still alive

  whom he had lodged dreamily

  in a “deep division of prodigious breasts.”

  Surely the poet is monarch of the clouds.

  He hovers, like a lemon-colored kite,

  over spring afternoons in the nineteenth century

  while Marx in the library gloom

  studies the birth rate of the weavers of Tilsit

  and that gentle man Bakunin,

  home after fingerfucking the countess,

  applies his numb hands

  to the making of bombs.

  MEASURE

  Recurrences.

  Coppery light hesitates

  again in the small-leaved

  Japanese plum. Summer

  and sunset, the peace

  of the writing desk

  and the habitual peace

  of writing, these things

  form an order I only

  belong to in the idleness

  of attention. Last light

  rims the blue mountain

  and I almost glimpse

  what I was born to,

  not so much in the sunlight

  or the plum tree

  as in the pulse

  that forms these lines.

  APPLICATIONS OF THE DOCTRINE

  That professor of French,

  trying to start his car

  among the innocent snowdrifts,

  is the author of a famous book

  on the self.

  The self is probably an illusion

  and language the structure of illusions.

  The self is beguiled, anyway,

  by this engine of thought.

  The self shuffles cards

  with absurd dexterity.

  The deck includes

  an infinite number

  of one-eyed jacks.

  on warm days

  he knows he should marry Being,

  a nice girl, steady

  but relentless.

  The self has agreed to lecture

  before a psychoanalytic study group.

  on the appointed day he

  does not appear, thereby

  meeting his obligation
.

  The self grants an audience

  to the Pope.

  They talk shop.

  The snark is writing a novel

  called The Hunting of the Self.

  The self is composing a monograph

  on the frames of antique mirrors.

  The self botanizes.

  He dreams of breeding, one day,

  an odorless narcissus.

  There is a girl the self loves.

  She has been trying to study him for days

  but her mind keeps

  wandering.

  HOUSE

  Quick in the April hedge

  were juncos and kinglets.

  I was at the window

  just now, the bacon

  sizzled under hand,

  the coffee steamed

  fragrantly & fountains

  of the Water Music

  issued from another room.

  Living in a house

  we live in the body

  of our lives, last night

  the odd after-dinner light

  of early spring & now

  the sunlight warming or

  shadowing the morning rooms.

  I am conscious of being

  myself the inhabitant

  of certain premises:

  coffee & bacon & Handel

  & upstairs asleep my wife.

  very suddenly

  old dusks break over me,

  the thick shagged heads

  of fig trees near the fence

  & not wanting to go in

  & swallows looping

  on the darkened hill

  & all that terror

  in the house

  & barely, only barely,

  a softball

  falling toward me

  like a moon.

  IN WEATHER

  1.

  What I wanted

  in the pearly repetitions of February

  was vision. All winter,

  grieved and dull,

  I hungered for it.

  Sundays I looked for lightningstricken

  trees

  in the slow burning of the afternoon

  to cut them down, split

  the dry centers,

  and kindle from their death