The Apple Trees at Olema Read online

  slow-motion of midmorning.

  Charlie is exclaiming:

  for him it is twenty years ago

  and raspberries and Vermont.

  We have stopped talking

  about L’Histoire de la vérité,

  about the subject and object

  and the mediation of desire.

  our ears are stoppered

  in the bee-hum. And Charlie,

  laughing wonderfully,

  beard stained purple

  by the word juice,

  goes to get a bigger pot.

  THE BEGINNING OF SEPTEMBER

  I.

  The child is looking in the mirror.

  His head falls to one side, his shoulders slump.

  He is practicing sadness.

  II.

  He didn’t think she ought to

  and she thought she should.

  III.

  In the summer

  peaches the color of sunrise

  In the fall

  plums the color of dusk

  IV.

  Each thing moves its own way

  in the wind. Bamboo flickers,

  the plum tree waves, and the loquat

  is shaken.

  V.

  The dangers are everywhere. Auxiliary verbs, fishbones, a fine carelessness. No one really likes the odor of geraniums, not the woman who dreams of sunlight and is always late for work nor the man who would be happy in altered circumstances. Words are abstract, but words are abstract is a dance, car crash, heart’s delight. It’s the design dumb hunger has upon the world. Nothing is severed on hot mornings when the deer nibble flower heads in a simmer of bay leaves. Somewhere in the summer dusk is the sound of children setting the table. That is mastery: spoon, knife, folded napkin, fork; glasses all around. The place for the plate is wholly imagined. Mother sits here and Father sits there and this is your place and this is mine. A good story compels you like sexual hunger but the pace is more leisurely. And there are always melons.

  VI.

  little mother

  little dragonfly quickness of summer mornings

  this is a prayer

  this is the body dressed in its own warmth

  at the change of seasons

  VII.

  There are not always melons

  There are always stories

  VIII.

  Chester found a dozen copies of his first novel in a used bookstore and took them to the counter. The owner said, “You can’t have them all,” so Chester kept five. The owner said, “That’ll be a hundred and twelve dollars.” Chester said, “What?” and the guy said, “They’re first editions, Mac, twenty bucks apiece.” And so Chester said, “Why are you charging me a hundred and twelve dollars?” The guy said, “Three of them are autographed.” Chester said, “Look, I wrote this book.” The guy said, “All right, a hundred. I won’t charge you for the autographs.”

  IX.

  The insides of peaches

  are the color of sunrise

  The outsides of plums

  are the color of dusk

  X.

  Here are some things to pray to in San Francisco: the bay, the mountain, the goddess of the city; remembering, forgetting, sudden pleasure, loss; sunrise and sunset; salt; the tutelary gods of Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Basque, French, Italian, and Mexican cooking; the solitude of coffeehouses and museums; the virgin, mother, and widow moons; hilliness, vistas; John McLaren; Saint Francis; the Mother of Sorrows; the rhythm of any life still whole through three generations; wine, especially zinfandel because from that Hungarian vine-slip came first a native wine not resinous and sugar-heavy; the sourdough mother, yeast and beginning; all fish and fisherman at the turning of the tide; the turning of the tide; eelgrass, oldest inhabitant; fog; seagulls; Joseph Worcester; plum blossoms; warm days in January…

  XI.

  She thought it was a good idea.

  He had his doubts.

  XII.

  ripe blackberries

  XIII.

  She said: reside, reside

  and he said, gored heart

  She said: sunlight, cypress

  he said, idiot children

  nibbling arsenic in flaking paint

  she said: a small pool of semen

  translucent on my belly

  he said maybe he said

  maybe

  XIV.

  the sayings of my grandmother:

  they’re the kind of people

  who let blackberries rot on the vine

  XV.

  The child approaches the mirror very fast

  then stops

  and watches himself

  gravely.

  XVI.

  So summer gives over—

  white to the color of straw

  dove gray to slate blue

  burnishings

  a little rain

  a little light on the water

  NOT GOING TO NEW YORK: A LETTER

  Dear Dan—

  This is a letter of apology, unrhymed. Rhyme belongs to the dazzling couplets of arrival. Survival is the art around here. It rhymes by accident with the rhythm of days which arrive like crows in a field of stubble corn in upstate New York in February. In upstate New York in February thaws hardened the heart against the wish for spring. There was not one thing in the barren meadows not muddy and raw-fleshed. At night I dreamed of small black snakes with orange markings disappearing down their holes, of being lost in the hemlocks and coming to a clearing of wild strawberry, sunlight, abandoned apple trees. At night it was mild noon in a clearing. Nothing arrived. This was a place left to flower in the plain cruelty of light. Mornings the sky was opal. The windows faced east and a furred snow reassumed the pines but arrived only mottled in the fields so that its flesh was my grandmother’s in the kitchen of the house on Jackson Street, and she was crying. I was a good boy. She held me so tight when she said that, smelling like sleep rotting if sleep rots, that I always knew how death would come to get me and the soft folds of her quivery white neck were what I saw, so that sometimes on an airplane I look down to snow covering the arroyos on the east side of the Sierra and it’s grandmother’s flesh and I look away. In the house on Jackson Street, I am the figure against the wall in Bonnard’s The Breakfast Room. The light is terrible. It is wishes that are fat dogs, already sated, snuffling at the heart in dreams. The table linen is so crisp it puts an end to fantasies of rectitude, clean hands, high art, and the blue beside the white in the striping is the color of the river Loire when you read about it in old books and dreamed of provincial breakfasts, the sun the color of bread crust and the fruit icy cold and there was no terrified figure dwarflike and correct, disappearing off the edge of Bonnard’s The Breakfast Room. It was not grandmother weeping in the breakfast room or the first thaw dream of beautiful small snakes slithering down holes. In this life that is not dreams but my life the clouds above the bay are massing toward December and gulls hover in the storm-pearled air and the last of last season’s cedar spits and kindles on the fire. Summer dries us out with golden light, so winter is a kind of spring here—wet trees, a reptile odor in the earth, mild greening—and the seasonal myths lie across one another in the quick darkening of days. Kristin and Luke are bent to a puzzle, some allegory of the quattrocento cut in a thousand small uneven pieces which, on the floor, they recompose with rapt, leisurely attention. Kristin asks, searching for a piece round at one end, fluted at the other, “Do you know what a shepherd is?” and Luke, looking for a square edge with a sprig of Italian olive in it, makes a guess. “Somebody who hurts sheep.” My grandmother was not so old. She was my mother’s mother; I think, the night before, my father must have told her we were going to move. She held me weeping, probably, because she felt she was about to lose her daughter. We only buried her this year. In the genteel hotel on Leavenworth that looked across a mile of human misery to the bay, she smoked regally, complained about her teeth. Luke watched her wide-eyed, with a mingled l
ook of wonder and religious dread she seemed so old. And once, when he reached up involuntarily to touch her withered cheek, she looked at him awhile and patted his cheek back and winked and said to me, askance: “old age ain’t for sissies.” This has nothing to do with the odd terror in my memory. It only explains it—the way this early winter weather makes life seem more commonplace and—at a certain angle—more intense. It is not poetry, where decay and a created radiance lie hidden inside words the way that memory folds them into living. “o Westmoreland thou art a summer bird that ever in the haunch of winter sings the lifting up of day.” Pasternak translated those lines. I imagine Russian summer, the smell of jasmine drifting toward the porch. I would like to get on a plane, but I would also like to sit on the porch and watch one shrink to the hovering of gulls and glint in the distance, circle east toward snow and disappear. He would have noticed the articles as a native speaker wouldn’t: a bird, the haunch; and understood a little what persists when, eyes half-closed, lattice-shadow on his face, he murmured the phrase in the dark vowels of his mother tongue.

  SONGS TO SURVIVE THE SUMMER

  It’s funny, isn’t it, Karamazov,

  all this grief and pancakes afterwards…

  These are the dog days,

  unvaried

  except by accident,

  mist rising from soaked lawns,

  gone world, everything

  rises and dissolves in air,

  whatever it is would

  clear the air

  dissolves in air and the knot

  of day unties

  invisibly like a shoelace.

  The gray-eyed child

  who said to my child: “Let’s play

  in my yard. It’s OK,

  my mother’s dead.”

  Under the loquat tree.

  It’s almost a song,

  the echo of a song:

  on the bat’s back I fly

  merrily toward summer

  or at high noon

  in the outfield clover

  guzzling orange Crush,

  time endless, examining

  a wooden coin I’d carried

  all through summer

  without knowing it.

  The coin was grandpa’s joke,

  carved from live oak,

  Indian side and buffalo side.

  His eyes lustered with a mirth

  so deep and rich he never

  laughed, as if it were a cosmic

  secret that we shared.

  I never understood; it married

  in my mind with summer. Don’t

  take any wooden nickels,

  kid, and gave me one

  under the loquat tree.

  The squalor of mind

  is formlessness,

  informis,

  the Romans said of ugliness,

  it has no form,

  a man’s misery, bleached skies,

  the war between desire

  and dailiness. I thought

  this morning of Wallace Stevens

  walking equably to work

  and of a morning two Julys ago

  on Chestnut Ridge, wandering

  down the hill when one

  rusty elm leaf, earth-

  skin peeling, wafted

  by me on the wind.

  My body groaned toward fall

  and preternaturally

  a heron lifted from the pond.

  I even thought I heard

  the ruffle of the wings

  three hundred yards below me

  rising from the reeds.

  Death is the mother of beauty

  and that clean-shaven man

  smelling of lotion,

  lint-free, walking

  toward his work, a

  pure exclusive music

  in his mind.

  The mother of the neighbor

  child was thirty-one,

  died, at Sunday breakfast,

  of a swelling in the throat.

  on a toy loom

  she taught my daughter

  how to weave. My daughter

  was her friend

  and now she cannot sleep

  for nighttime sirens,

  sure that every wail

  is someone dead.

  Should I whisper in her ear,

  death is the mother

  of beauty? Wooden

  nickels, kid? It’s all in

  shapeliness, give your

  fears a shape?

  In fact, we hide together

  in her books.

  Prairie farms, the heron

  knows the way, old

  country songs, herbal magic,

  recipes for soup,

  tales of spindly orphan

  girls who find

  the golden key, the

  darkness at the center

  of the leafy wood.

  And when she finally sleeps

  I try out Chekhov’s

  tenderness to see

  what it can save.

  Maryushka the beekeeper’s

  widow,

  though three years mad,

  writes daily letters

  to her son. Semyon transcribes

  them. The pages

  are smudged by his hands,

  stained with

  the dregs of tea:

  “My dearest Vanushka,

  Sofia Agrippina’s ill

  again. The master

  asks for you. Wood

  is dear. The cold

  is early. Poor

  Sofia Agrippina!

  The foreign doctor

  gave her salts

  but Semyon says her icon

  candle guttered

  St. John’s Eve. I am afraid,

  Vanya. When she ’s ill,

  the master likes to have

  your sister flogged.

  She means no harm.

  The rye is gray

  this time of year.

  When it is bad, Vanya,

  I go into the night

  and the night eats me.”

  The haiku comes

  in threes

  with the virtues of brevity:

  What a strange thing!

  To be alive

  beneath plum blossoms.

  The black-headed

  Steller’s jay is squawking

  in our plum.

  Thief! Thief!

  A hard, indifferent bird,

  he’d snatch your life.

  The love of books

  is for children

  who glimpse in them

  a life to come, but

  I have come

  to that life and

  feel uneasy

  with the love of books.

  This is my life,

  time islanded

  in poems of dwindled time.

  There is no other world.

  But I have seen it twice.

  In the Palo Alto marsh

  sea birds rose in early light

  and took me with them.

  Another time, dreaming,

  river birds lifted me,

  swans, small angelic terns,

  and an old woman in a shawl

  dying by a dying lake

  whose life raised men

  from the dead

  in another country.

  Thick nights, and nothing

  lets us rest. In the heat

  of mid-July our lust

  is nothing. We swell

  and thicken. Slippery,

  purgatorial, our sexes

  will not give us up.

  Exhausted after hours

  and not undone,

  we crave cold marrow

  from the tiny bones that

  moonlight scatters

  on our skin. Always

  morning arrives,

  the stunned days,

  faceless, droning

  in the juice of rotten quince,

  the flies, the hea
t.

  Tears, silence.

  The edified generations

  eat me, Maryushka.

  I tell them

  pain is form and

  almost persuade

  myself. They are not

  listening. Why

  should they? Who

  cannot save me anymore

  than I, weeping

  over Great Russian Short

  Stories in summer,

  under the fattened figs,

  saved you. Besides,

  it is winter there.

  They are trying out

  a new recipe for onion soup.

  Use a heavy-bottomed

  three- or four-quart pan.

  Thinly slice six large

  yellow onions and sauté

  in olive oil and butter

  until limp. Pour in

  beef broth. Simmer

  thirty minutes,

  add red port and bake

  for half an hour. Then

  sprinkle half a cup

  of diced Gruyère and cover

  with an even layer

  of toasted bread and

  shredded Samsoe. Dribble

  melted butter on the top

  and bake until the cheese

  has bubbled gold.

  Surround yourself with friends.

  Huddle in a warm place.

  Ladle. Eat.

  Weave and cry.

  Child, every other siren

  is a death;