The Apple Trees at Olema Read online

  the rest are for speeding.

  Look how comically the jay’s

  black head emerges

  from a swath of copper leaves.

  Half the terror

  is the fact that,

  in our time, speed saves us,

  a whine we’ve traded

  for the hopeless patience

  of the village bell

  which tolled in threes:

  weave and cry and weave.

  Wilhelm Steller, form’s

  hero, made

  a healing broth.

  He sailed with Bering

  and the crew despised him,

  a mean impatient man

  born low enough

  to hate the lower class.

  For two years

  he’d connived to join

  the expedition and put

  his name to all the beasts

  and flowers of the north.

  Now, Bering sick,

  the crew half-mad with scurvy,

  no one would let him

  go ashore. Panic,

  the maps were useless,

  the summer weather almost gone.

  He said, there are herbs

  that can cure you,

  I can save you all. He didn’t

  give a damn about them

  and they knew it. For two years

  he’d prepared. Bering listened.

  Asleep in his bunk, he ’d

  seen death writing in the log.

  on the island while

  the sailors searched for water

  Steller gathered herbs

  and looking up

  he saw the blue, black-crested

  bird, shrilling in a pine.

  His mind flipped to

  Berlin, the library, a glimpse

  he’d had at Audubon,

  a blue-gray crested bird

  exactly like the one

  that squawked at him, a

  Carolina jay, unlike

  any European bird; he knew

  then where they were,

  America, we’re saved.

  No one believed him or,

  sick for home, they didn’t care

  what wilderness

  it was. They set sail

  west. Bering died.

  Steller’s jay, by which

  I found Alaska.

  He wrote it in his book.

  Saved no one. Still

  walking in the redwoods

  I hear the cry

  thief, thief, and

  think of Wilhelm Steller;

  in my dream we

  are all saved. Camping

  on a clement shore

  in early fall, a strange land.

  We feast most delicately.

  The swans are stuffed with grapes,

  the turkey with walnut

  and chestnut and wild plum.

  The river is our music: unalaska

  (to make bread from acorns

  we leach the tannic acid out—

  this music, child,

  and more, much more!).

  When I was just

  your age, the war was over

  and we moved.

  An Okie family lived

  next door to our new

  country house. That summer

  Quincy Phipps was saved.

  The next his house became

  an unofficial Pentecostal church.

  Summer nights: hidden

  in the garden I ate figs,

  watched where the knobby limbs

  rose up and flicked

  against the windows where

  they were. O Je-sus.

  Kissed and put to bed,

  I slipped from the window

  to the eaves and nestled

  by the loquat tree.

  The fruit was yellow-brown

  in daylight; under the moon

  pale clusters hung

  like other moons, O

  Je-sus, and I picked them;

  the fat juices

  dribbling down my chin,

  I sucked and listened.

  Men groaned. The women

  sobbed and moaned, a

  long unsteady belly-deep

  bewildering sound, half

  pleasure and half pain

  that ended sometimes

  in a croon, a broken song:

  O Je-sus,

  Je-sus.

  That is what I have

  to give you, child, stories,

  songs, loquat seeds,

  curiously shaped; they

  are the frailest stay against

  our fears. Death

  in the sweetness, in the bitter

  and the sour, death

  in the salt, your tears,

  this summer ripe and overripe.

  It is a taste in the mouth,

  child. We are the song

  death takes its own time

  singing. It calls us

  as I call you child

  to calm myself. It is every

  thing touched casually,

  lovers, the images

  of saviors, books, the coin

  I carried in my pocket

  till it shone, it is

  all things lustered

  by the steady thoughtlessness

  of human use.

  Human Wishes

  SPRING DRAWING

  A man thinks lilacs against white houses, having seen them in the farm country south of Tacoma in April, and can’t find his way to a sentence, a brushstroke carrying the energy of brush and stroke

  —as if he were stranded on the aureole of the memory of a woman’s breast,

  and she, after the drive from the airport and a chat with her mother and a shower, which is ritual cleansing and a passage through water to mark transition,

  had walked up the mountain on a summer evening.

  Away from, not toward. As if the garden roses were a little hobby of the dead. As if the deer pellets in the pale grass and the wavering moon and the rondure—as they used to say, upping the ante—of heaven

  were admirable completely, but only as common nouns of a plainer intention, moon, shit, sky,

  as if spirit attended to plainness only, the more complicated forms exhausting it, tossed-off grape stems becoming crystal chandeliers,

  as if radiance were the meaning of meaning, and justice responsible to daydream not only for the strict beauty of denial,

  but as a need to reinvent the inner form of wishing.

  Only the force of the brushstroke keeps the lilacs from pathos—the hes and shes of the comedy may or may not get together, but if they are to get at all,

  then the interval created by if, to which mind and breath attend, nervous as the grazing animals the first brushes painted,

  has become habitable space, lived in beyond wishing.

  VINTAGE

  They had agreed, walking into the delicatessen on Sixth Avenue, that their friends’ affairs were focused and saddened by massive projection;

  movie screens in their childhood were immense, and someone had proposed that need was unlovable.

  The delicatessen had a chicken salad with chunks of cooked chicken in a creamy basil mayonnaise a shade lighter than the Coast Range in August; it was gray outside, February.

  Eating with plastic forks, walking and talking in the sleety afternoon, they passed a house where Djuna Barnes was still, reportedly, making sentences.

  Bashō said: avoid adjectives of scale, you will love the world more and desire it less.

  And there were other propositions to consider: childhood, VistaVision, a pair of wet, mobile lips on the screen at least eight feet long.

  On the corner a blind man with one leg was selling pencils. He must have received a disability check,

  but it didn’t feed his hunger for public agony, and he sat on the sidewalk slack-jawed, with a tin cup, his face and opaque eyes turned upward in a look of blind, questing pathos—


  half Job, half mole.

  Would the good Christ of Manhattan have restored his sight and two thirds of his left leg? Or would he have healed his heart and left him there in a mutilated body? And what would that peace feel like?

  It makes you want, at this point, a quick cut, or a reaction shot. “The taxis rivered up Sixth Avenue.” “A little sunlight touched the steeple of the First Magyar Reform Church.”

  In fact, the clerk in the liquor store was appalled. “No, no,” he said, “that cabernet can’t be drunk for another five years.”

  SPRING RAIN

  Now the rain is falling, freshly, in the intervals between sunlight,

  a Pacific squall started no one knows where, drawn east as the drifts of warm air make a channel;

  it moves its own way, like water or the mind,

  and spills this rain passing over. The Sierras will catch it as last snow flurries before summer, observed only by the wakened marmots at ten thousand feet,

  and we will come across it again as larkspur and penstemon sprouting along a creek above Sonora Pass next August,

  where the snowmelt will have trickled into Deadman Creek and the creek spilled into the Stanislaus and the Stanislaus into the San Joaquin and the San Joaquin into the slow salt marshes of the bay.

  That’s not the end of it: the gray jays of the mountains eat larkspur seeds, which cannot propagate otherwise.

  To simulate the process, you have to soak gathered seeds all night in the acids of coffee

  and then score them gently with a very sharp knife before you plant them in the garden.

  You might use what was left of the coffee we drank in Lisa’s kitchen visiting.

  There were orange poppies on the table in a clear glass vase, stained near the bottom to the color of sunrise;

  the unstated theme was the blessedness of gathering and the blessing of dispersal—

  it made you glad for beauty like that, casual and intense, lasting as long as the poppies last.

  LATE SPRING

  And then in mid-May the first morning of steady heat,

  the morning, Leif says, when you wake up, put on shorts, and that’s it for the day,

  when you pour coffee and walk outside, blinking in the sun.

  Strawberries have appeared in the markets, and peaches will soon;

  squid is so cheap in the fish stores you begin to consult Japanese and Italian cookbooks for the various and ingenious ways of preparing ika and calamari;

  and because the light will enlarge your days, your dreams at night will be as strange as the jars of octopus you saw once in a fisherman’s boat under the summer moon;

  and after swimming, white wine; and the sharing of stories before dinner is prolonged because the relations of the children in the neighborhood have acquired village intensity and the stories take longer telling;

  and there are the nights when the fog rolls in that nobody likes—hey, fog, the Miwok sang, who lived here first, you better go home, pelican is beating your wife—

  and after dark in the first cool hour, your children sleep so heavily in their beds exhausted from play, it is a pleasure to watch them,

  Leif does not move a muscle as he lies there; no, wait; it is Luke who lies there in his eight-year-old body,

  Leif is taller than you are and he isn’t home; when he is, his feet will extend past the end of the mattress, and Kristin is at the corner in the dark, talking to neighborhood boys;

  things change; there is no need for this dream-compelled narration; the rhythm will keep me awake, changing.

  RUSIA EN 1931

  The archbishop of San Salvador is dead, murdered by no one knows who. The left says the right, the right says provocateurs.

  But the families in the barrios sleep with their children beside them and a pitchfork, or a rifle if they have one.

  And posterity is grubbing in the footnotes to find out who the bishop is,

  or waiting for the poet to get back to his business. Well, there’s this:

  her breasts are the color of brown stones in moonlight, and paler in moonlight.

  And that should hold them for a while. The bishop is dead. Poetry proposes no solutions: it says justice is the well water of the city of Novgorod, black and sweet.

  César Vallejo died on a Thursday. It might have been malaria, no one is sure; it burned through the small town of Santiago de Chuco in an Andean valley in his childhood; it may very well have flared in his veins in Paris on a rainy day;

  and nine months later Osip Mandelstam was last seen feeding off the garbage heap of a transit camp near Vladivostok.

  They might have met in Leningrad in 1931, on a corner; two men about forty; they could have compared gray hair at the temples, or compared reviews of Trilce and Tristia in 1922.

  What French they would have spoken! And what the one thought would save Spain killed the other.

  “I am no wolf by blood,” Mandelstam wrote that year. “Only an equal could break me.”

  And Vallejo: “Think of the unemployed. Think of the forty million families of the hungry….”

  SPRING DRAWING 2

  A man says lilacs against white houses, two sparrows, one streaked, in a thinning birch, and can’t find his way to a sentence.

  In order to be respectable, Thorstein Veblen said, desperate in Palo Alto, a thing must be wasteful, i.e., “a selective adaptation of forms to the end of conspicuous waste.”

  So we try to throw nothing away, as Keith, making dinner for us as his grandmother had done in Jamaica, left nothing; the kitchen was as clean at the end as when he started; even the shrimp shells and carrot fronds were part of the process,

  and he said, when we tried to admire him, “Listen, I should send you into the chicken yard to look for a rusty nail to add to the soup for iron.”

  The first temptation of Sakyamuni was desire, but he saw that it led to fulfillment and then to desire, so that one was easy.

  Because I have pruned it badly in successive years, the climbing rose has sent out, among the pale pink floribunda, a few wild white roses from the rootstalk.

  Suppose, before they said silver or moonlight or wet grass, each poet had to agree to be responsible for the innocence of all the suffering on earth,

  because they learned in arithmetic, during the long school days, that if there was anything left over,

  you had to carry it. The wild rose looks weightless, the floribunda are heavy with the richness and sadness of Europe

  as they imitate the dying, petal by petal, of the people who bred them.

  You hear pain singing in the nerves of things; it is not a song.

  The gazelle’s head turned; three jackals are eating his entrails and he is watching.

  CALM

  1.

  September sun, a little fog in the mornings. No sanctified terror. At night Luke says, “How do you connect a b to an a in cursive?” He is bent to the task with such absorption that he doesn’t notice the Scarlatti on the stereo, which he would in other circumstances turn off. He has said that chamber music sounds to him worried. I go out and look at the early stars. They glow faintly; faintly the mountain is washed in the color of sunset, at that season a faded scarlet like the petals of the bougainvillea which is also fading. A power saw, somewhere in the neighborhood, is enacting someone’s idea of more pleasure, an extra room or a redwood tub. It hums and stops, hums and stops.

  2.

  In the dream there was a face saying no. Not with words. Brow furrow, crow’s-feet, lip curl: no, it is forbidden to you, no. But it was featureless, you could put your hand through it and feel cold on the other side. It was not the father-face saying no among the torsos and pillars of aluminum nor the mother-face weeping no, no, no at the gate that guards rage; it was not even the idiot face of the obedient brother tacking his list of a hundred and seventy-five reasons why not on the greenhouse door. This face spits on archetypes, spits on caves, rainbows, the little human luxury of historical explanation. The meadow, you remem
ber the meadow? And the air in June which held the scent of it as the woman in religious iconography holds the broken son? You can go into that meadow, the light routed by a brilliant tenderness of green, a cool V carved by a muskrat in the blue-gray distance of the pond, black-eyed Susans everywhere. You can go there.

  MUSEUM

  On the morning of the Käthe Kollwitz exhibit, a young man and woman come into the museum restaurant. She is carrying a baby; he carries the air-freight edition of the Sunday New York Times. She sits in a high-backed wicker chair, cradling the infant in her arms. He fills a tray with fresh fruit, rolls, and coffee in white cups and brings it to the table. His hair is tousled, her eyes are puffy. They look like they were thrown down into sleep and then yanked out of it like divers coming up for air. He holds the baby. She drinks coffee, scans the front page, butters a roll, and eats it in their little corner in the sun. After a while, she holds the baby. He reads the Book Review and eats some fruit. Then he holds the baby while she finds the section of the paper she wants and eats fruit and smokes. They’ve hardly exchanged a look. Meanwhile, I have fallen in love with this equitable arrangement, and with the baby who cooperates by sleeping. All around them are faces Käthe Kollwitz carved in wood of people with no talent or capacity for suffering who are suffering the numbest kinds of pain: hunger, helpless terror. But this young couple is reading the Sunday paper in the sun, the baby is sleeping, the green has begun to emerge from the rind of the cantaloupe, and everything seems possible.