The Apple Trees at Olema Read online

  an evening’s warmth

  in the uxorious amber repetitions

  of the house. Dusks

  weighted me, the fire,

  the dim trees. I saw

  the bare structure

  of their hunger for light

  reach to where darkness

  joined them. The dark

  and the limbs tangled

  luxuriant as hair.

  I could feel night gather them

  but removed my eyes from the tug of it

  and watched the fire,

  a smaller thing,

  contained by the hewn stone

  of the dark hearth.

  2.

  I can’t decide

  about my garbage and the creatures

  who come at night to root

  and scatter it. I could lock it

  in the shed, but I imagine

  wet noses, bodies grown alert

  to the smells of warm decay

  in the cold air. It seems a small thing

  to share what I don’t want,

  but winter mornings the white yard

  blossoms grapefruit peels,

  tin cans, plastic bags,

  the russet cores of apples.

  The refuse of my life

  surrounds me and the sense of waste

  in the dreary gathering of it

  compels me all the more

  to labor for the creatures

  who quiver and are quick-eyed

  and bang the cans at night

  and are not grateful. The other morning,

  walking early in the new sun,

  I was rewarded. A thaw turned up

  the lobster shells from Christmas Eve.

  They rotted in the yard

  and standing in the muddy field I caught,

  as if across great distances,

  a faint rank fragrance of the sea.

  3.

  There are times

  I wish my ignorance were

  more complete. I remember

  clamming inland beaches

  on the January tides

  along Tomales Bay. A raw world

  where green crabs

  which have been exposed

  graze nervously on intertidal kelp

  and sea anemones are clenched and colorless

  in eddying pools

  near dumb clinging starfish

  on the sides and undersides of rock.

  Among the cockles and the horseneck clams,

  I turned up long, inch-thick

  sea worms. Female,

  phallic, ruddy brown, each one

  takes twenty years to grow.

  Beach people call them innkeepers

  because the tiny male lives inside

  and feeds on plankton

  in the water that the worm

  churns through herself to move.

  I watched the brown things

  that brightness bruised

  writhing in the sun. Then,

  carefully, I buried them.

  And, eyes drifting, heartsick,

  honed to the wind’s edge,

  my mind became the male

  drowsing in that inland sea

  who lives in darkness,

  drops seed twice in twenty years,

  and dies. I look from my window

  to the white fields

  and think about the taste of clams.

  4.

  A friend, the other night,

  read poems full of rage

  against the poor uses of desire

  in mere enactment. A cruel music

  lingered in my mind.

  The poems made me think

  I understood

  why men cut women up. Hating

  the source, nerved

  irreducible, that music hacked

  the body till the source was gone.

  Then the heavy cock wields,

  rises, spits seed

  at random and the man

  shrieks, homeless

  and perfected in the empty dark.

  His god is a thrust of infinite desire

  beyond the tame musk

  of companionable holes.

  It descends to women occasionally

  with contempt and languid tenderness.

  I tried to hate my wife ’s cunt,

  the sweet place where I rooted,

  to imagine the satisfied disgust

  of cutting her apart,

  bloody and exultant

  in the bad lighting and scratchy track

  of butcher shops

  in short experimental films.

  It was easier that I might have supposed.

  o spider cunt, o raw devourer.

  I wondered what to make

  of myself. There had been a thaw.

  I looked for green shoots

  in the garden, wild flowers in the woods.

  I found none.

  5.

  In March the owls

  began to mate. Moon

  on windy snow. Mournful,

  liquid, the dark hummed

  their cries, a soft

  confusion. Hard frost

  feathered the windows.

  I could not sleep.

  I imagined the panic

  of the meadow mouse,

  the star-nosed mole.

  Slowly at first, I

  made a solemn face

  and tried the almost human wail

  of owls, ecstatic

  in the winter trees, twoo, twoo.

  I drew long breaths.

  My wife stirred in our bed.

  Joy seized me.

  6.

  Days return

  day to me, the brittle light.

  My alertness has no

  issue. Deep in the woods

  starburst needles of the white pine

  are roof to the vacancies

  in standing still. Wind

  from the lake stings me.

  Hemlocks grow cerebral

  and firm in the dim attenuation

  of the afternoon. The longer

  dusks are a silence

  born in pale redundancies

  of silence. Walking home

  I follow the pawprints of the fox.

  I know that I know myself

  no more than a seed

  curled in the dark of a winged pod

  knows flourishing.

  Praise

  We asked the captain what course

  of action he proposed to take toward

  a beast so large, terrifying, and

  unpredictable. He hesitated to

  answer, and then said judiciously:

  “I think I shall praise it.”

  HEROIC SIMILE

  When the swordsman fell in Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai

  in the gray rain,

  in Cinemascope and the Tokugawa dynasty,

  he fell straight as a pine, he fell

  as Ajax fell in Homer

  in chanted dactyls and the tree was so huge

  the woodsman returned for two days

  to that lucky place before he was done with the sawing

  and on the third day he brought his uncle.

  They stacked logs in the resinous air,

  hacking the small limbs off,

  tying those bundles separately.

  The slabs near the root

  were quartered and still they were awkwardly large;

  the logs from the midtree they halved:

  ten bundles and four great piles of fragrant wood,

  moons and quarter moons and half-moons

  ridged by the saw’s tooth.

  The woodsman and the old man his uncle

  are standing in midforest

  on a floor of pine silt and spring mud.

  They have stopped working

  because they are tired and because

  I have imagined no pack animal

  or primitive wagon. They are too cannyr />
  to call in neighbors and come home

  with a few logs after three days’ work.

  They are waiting for me to do something

  or for the overseer of the Great Lord

  to come and arrest them.

  How patient they are!

  The old man smokes a pipe and spits.

  The young man is thinking he would be rich

  if he were already rich and had a mule.

  Ten days of hauling

  and on the seventh day they’ll probably

  be caught, go home empty-handed

  or worse. I don’t know

  whether they’re Japanese or Mycenaean

  and there ’s nothing I can do.

  The path from here to that village

  is not translated. A hero, dying,

  gives off stillness to the air.

  A man and a woman walk from the movies

  to the house in the silence of separate fidelities.

  There are limits to imagination.

  MEDITATION AT LAGUNITAS

  All the new thinking is about loss.

  In this it resembles all the old thinking.

  The idea, for example, that each particular erases

  the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-

  faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk

  of that black birch is, by his presence,

  some tragic falling off from a first world

  of undivided light. or the other notion that,

  because there is in this world no one thing

  to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,

  a word is elegy to what it signifies.

  We talked about it late last night and in the voice

  of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone

  almost querulous. After a while I understood that,

  talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,

  pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman

  I made love to and I remembered how, holding

  her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,

  I felt a violent wonder at her presence

  like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river

  with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,

  muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish

  called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to with her.

  Longing, we say, because desire is full

  of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.

  But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,

  the thing her father said that hurt her, what

  she dreamed. The are moments when the body is as numinous

  as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.

  Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,

  saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

  SUNRISE

  Ah, love, this is fear. This is fear and syllables

  and the beginnings of beauty. We have walked the city,

  a flayed animal signifying death, a hybrid god

  who sings in the desolation of filth and money

  a song the heart is heavy to receive. We mourn

  otherwise. otherwise the ranked monochromes,

  the death-teeth of that horizon, survive us

  as we survive pleasure. What a small hope.

  What a fierce small privacy of consolation.

  What a dazzle of petals for the poor meat.

  Blind, with eyes like stars, like astral flowers,

  from the purblind mating sickness of the beasts

  we rise, trout-shaken, in the gaping air,

  in terror, the scarlet sun-flash

  leaping from the pond’s imagination

  of a deadly sea. Fish, mole,

  we are the small stunned creatures

  inside these human resurrections, the nights

  the city praises and defiles. From there we all

  walk slowly to the sea gathering scales

  from the cowled whisper of the waves,

  the mensural polyphony. Small stars,

  and blind the hunger under sun,

  we turn to each other and turn to each other

  in the mother air of what we want.

  That is why blind Orpheus praises love

  and why love gouges out our eyes

  and why all lovers smell their way to Dover.

  That is why innocence has so much to account for,

  why Venus appears least saintly in the attitudes of shame.

  This is lost children and the deep sweetness of the pulp,

  a blue thrumming at the formed bone, river,

  flame, quicksilver. It is not the fire

  we hunger for and not the ash. It is the still hour,

  a deer come slowly to the creek at dusk,

  the table set for abstinence, windows

  full of flowers like summer in the provinces

  vanishing when the moon’s half-face pallor

  rises on the dark flax line of hills.

  THE YELLOW BICYCLE

  The woman I love is greedy,

  but she refuses greed.

  She walks so straightly.

  When I ask her what she wants,

  she says, “A yellow bicycle.”

  Sun, sunflower,

  coltsfoot on the roadside,

  a goldfinch, the sign

  that says Yield, her hair,

  cat’s eyes, his hunger

  and a yellow bicycle.

  Once, when they had made love in the middle of the night and it was very sweet, they decided they were hungry, so they got up, got dressed, and drove downtown to an all-night donut shop. Chicano kids lounged outside, a few drunks, and one black man selling dope. Just at the entrance there was an old woman in a thin floral print dress. She was barefoot. Her face was covered with sores and dry peeling skin. The sores looked like raisins and her skin was the dry yellow of a parchment lampshade ravaged by light and tossed away. They thought she must have been hungry and, coming out again with a white paper bag full of hot rolls, they stopped to offer her one. She looked at them out of her small eyes, bewildered, and shook her head for a little while, and said very kindly, “No.”

  Her song to the yellow bicycle:

  The boats on the bay

  have nothing on you,

  my swan, my sleek one!

  AGAINST BOTTICELLI

  1.

  In the life we lead together every paradise is lost.

  Nothing could be easier: summer gathers new leaves

  to casual darkness. So few things we need to know.

  And the old wisdoms shudder in us and grow slack.

  Like renunciation. Like the melancholy beauty

  of giving it all up. Like walking steadfast

  in the rhythms, winter light and summer dark.

  And the time for cutting furrows and the dance.

  Mad seed. Death waits it out. It waits us out,

  the sleek incandescent saints, earthly and prayerful.

  In our modesty. In our shamefast and steady attention

  to the ceremony, its preparation, the formal hovering

  of pleasure which falls like the rain we pray not to get

  and are glad for and drown in. or spray of that sea,

  irised: otters in the tide lash, in the kelp-drench,

  mammal warmth and the inhuman element. Ah, that is the secret.

  That she is an otter, that Botticelli saw her so.

  That we are not otters and are not in the painting

  by Botticelli. We are not even in the painting by Bosch

  where the people are standing around looking at the frame

  of the Botticelli painting and when Love arrives, they throw up.

  or the Goya painting of the sad ones, angular and shriven,

  who watch the Bosch and feel very compassionate

  but hurt each other often and inefficiently. We
are not in any painting.

  If we do it at all, we will be like the old Russians.

  We’ll walk down through scrub oak to the sea

  and where the seals lie preening on the beach

  we will look at each other steadily

  and butcher them and skin them.

  2.

  The myth they chose was the constant lovers.

  The theme was richness over time.

  It is a difficult story and the wise never choose it

  because it requires a long performance

  and because there is nothing, by definition, between the acts.

  It is different in kind from a man and the pale woman

  he fucks in the ass underneath the stars

  because it is summer and they are full of longing

  and sick of birth. They burn coolly

  like phosphorus, and the thing need be done

  only once. Like the sacking of Troy

  it survives in imagination,

  in the longing brought perfectly to closing,

  the woman’s white hands opening, opening,

  and the man churning inside her, thrashing there.

  And light travels as if all the stars they were under

  exploded centuries ago and they are resting now, glowing.

  The woman thinks what she is feeling is like the dark

  and utterly complete. The man is past sadness,

  though his eyes are wet. He is learning about gratitude,

  how final it is, as if the grace in Botticelli’s Primavera,

  the one with sad eyes who represents pleasure,

  had a canvas to herself, entirely to herself.

  LIKE THREE FAIR BRANCHES FROM ONE ROOT DERIV’D

  I am outside a door and inside

  the words do not fumble

  as I fumble saying this.

  It is the same in the dream

  where I touch you. Notice

  in this poem the thinning out

  of particulars. The gate

  with the three snakes is burning,

  symbolically, which doesn’t mean

  the flames can’t hurt you.

  Now it is the pubic arch instead

  and smells of oils and driftwood,

  of our bodies working very hard

  at pleasure but they are not

  thinking about us. Bless them,

  it is not a small thing to be

  happily occupied, go by them

  on tiptoe. Now the gate is marble

  and the snakes are graces.

  You are the figure in the center.

  on the left you are going away

  from yourself. on the right