The Apple Trees at Olema (12 page)

Pleasure is so hard to remember. It goes

so quick from the mind. That day in third grade,

I thought I heard the teacher say the ones

who finished the assignment could go home.

I had a new yellow rubber raincoat

with a hat, blue galoshes; I put them on,

took my lunch pail and my books and started

for the door. The whole class giggled. Somehow

I had misheard. “Where are
you
going?”

the teacher said. The kids all roared. I froze.

In yellow rubber like a bathtub toy.

That memory comes when I call, vivid,

large and embarrassing like the helpless

doglike fidelity of my affections,

and I flush each time. But the famous night

we first made love, I think I remember

stars, that the moon was watery and pale.

It always circles back to being seen.

Psyche in the dark, Psyche in the daylight

counting seed. We go to the place where words

aren't and we die, suffer resurrection

two by two. Some men sleep, some read, some

want chocolate in the middle of the night.

They look at you adoring and you wonder

what it is they think they see. Themselves

transformed, adored. oh, it makes me tired

and it doesn't work. on the floor in the sunlight

he looked sweet. Laughing, hair tangled, he said

I was all he wanted. If he were all I

wanted, he 'd be life. I saw from the window

Mrs. Piombo in the backyard, planting phlox

in her immaculate parable of a garden.

She wears her black sweater under the cypress

in the sun. Life fits her like a glove,

she doesn't seem to think it's very much.

Near Point Sur Lighthouse, morning, dunes

of white sand the eelgrass holds in place.

I saw at a distance what looked like feet

lifted in the air. I was on the reef,

I thought I was alone in all the silence,

poking anemones, watching turban snails

slide across the brown kelp in tidal pools.

And then I saw them. It was all I saw—

a pair of ankles; lifted, tentative.

They twitched like eyelids, like a nerve jumping

in the soft flesh of the arm. My crotch throbbed

and my throat went dry. Absurd. Pico Blanco

in the distance and the summer heat steady

as a hand. I wanted to be touched

and didn't want to want it. And by whom?

The sea foamed easily around the rocks

like the pathos of every summer. In the pools

anemones, cream-colored, little womb-mouths,

oldest animal with its one job to do

I carry as a mystery inside

or else it carries me around it, petals

to its stamen. And then I heard her cry.

Sharp, brief, a gull's hunger bleeding off the wind.

A sound like anguish. Driving up the coast—

succulents ablaze on the embankments,

morning glory on the freeway roadcuts

where the rifles crackled at the army base—

I thought that life was hunger moving and

that hunger was a form of suffering.

The drive from the country to the city

was the distance from solitude to wanting,

or to union, or to something else—the city

with its hills and ill-lit streets, a vast

dull throb of light, dimming the night sky.

What a funny place to center longing,

in a stranger. All I have to do is reach

down once and touch his cheek and the long fall

from paradise begins. The dream in which

I'm stuck and Father comes to help but then

takes off his mask, the one in which shit, oozing

from a wound, forms delicate rosettes, the dream

in which my book is finished and my shoulders

start to sprout a pelt of hair, or the woman

in the sari, prone, covered with menstrual

blood, her arms raised in supplication.

We take that into the dark. Sex is peace

because it's so specific. And metaphors:

live milk, blond hills, blood singing,

hilarity that comes and goes like rain,

you got me coffee, I'll get you your book,

something to sleep beside, with, against.

The morning light comes up, and their voices

through the wall, the matter-of-fact chatter

of the child dawdling at breakfast, a clink

of spoons. It's in small tasks the mirrors

disappear, the old woman already

gone shopping. Her apricot, pruned yesterday,

is bare. To be used up like that. Psyche

punished for her candle in the dark.

oil painting is a form of ownership.

The essay writer who was here last year,

at someone's party, a heavy man with glasses,

Persian cat. Art since the Renaissance

is ownership. I should get down to work.

You and the task—the third that makes a circle

is the imagined end. You notice rhythms

washing over you, opening and closing,

they are the world, inside you, and you work.

Body Through Which the Dream Flows

You count up everything you have

or have let go.

What's left is the lost and the possible.

To the lost, the irretrievable

or just out of reach, you say:

light loved the pier, the seedy

string quartet of the sun going down over water

that gilds ants and beach fleas

ecstatic and communal on the stiffened body

of a dead grebe washed ashore

by last night's storm. Idiot sorrow,

an irregular splendor, is the half sister

of these considerations.

To the possible you say nothing.

October on the planet.

Huge moon, bright stars.

The lovers Undressing

They put on rising, and they rose.

They put on falling, and they fell.

They were the long grass on the hillside

that shudders in the wind. They sleep.

Days, kitchens. Cut flowers,

shed petals, smell of lemon, smell of toast

or soap. Are you upset about something,

one says. No, the other says.

Are you sure, the one says.

Yes, the other says, I'm sure.

Sad

often we are sad animals.

Bored dogs, monkeys getting rained on.

Migration

A small brown wren in the tangle

of the climbing rose. April:

last rain, the first dazzle

and reluctance of the light.

Dark

Desire lies down with the day

and the night birds wake

to their fast heartbeats

in the trees. The woman beside you

is breathing evenly. All day

you were in a body. Now

you are in a skull. Wind,

streetlights, trees flicker

on the ceiling in the dark.

Things Change

Small song,

two beat:

the robin on the lawn

hops from sun

into shadow, shadow

into sun.

Stories in Bed

In the field behind her house, she said,

fennel grew high and green

in early summer, and the air

smelled like little anise-scented loaves

in the Italian restaurants her father

used to take them to on Sunday nights.

She had to sit up straight:

it was the idea of family

they failed at. She lights a cigarette,

remembering the taut veins

in her mother's neck, how she had studied them,

repelled. He has begun to drowse:

backyards, her voice, dusty fennel,

the festering sweetness of the plums.

Monday Morning, Late Summer

on the fence

in the sunlight,

beach towels.

No wind.

The apricots have ripened

and been picked.

The blackberries have ripened

and been picked.

So

They walked along the dry gully.

Cottonwoods, so the river must be underground.

Plus Which

She turned to him. or, alternatively,

she turned away. Doves let loose

above the sea, or the sea at night

beating on the pylons of a bridge.

off-season: the candles were Mediterranean,

opaque, and the cat cried
olor
,

olor, olor
in the blue susurrations

of heather by the outhouse door.

Mornings on the south side of the house

just outside the kitchen door

arrived early in summer—

when Luke was four or five

he would go out there, still in his dandelion-

yellow pajamas on May mornings

and lie down on the first warm stone.

For years, when the green nubs of apricots

first sprouted on the backyard tree,

I thought about a bench in that spot,

a redwood screen behind green brushstrokes

of bamboo, and one April, walking into the kitchen,

I felt like a stranger to my life

and it scared me, so when the gray doves returned

to the telephone wires

and the lemons were yellowing

and no other task presented itself,

I finally went into the garden and started

digging, trying to marry myself

and my hands to that place.

Household verses: “Who are you?”

the rubber duck in my hand asked Kristin

once, while she was bathing, three years old.

“Kristin,” she said, laughing, her delicious

name, delicious self. “That's just your name,”

the duck said. “Who are you?” “Kristin,”

she said. “Kristin's a name. Who are you?”

the duck asked. She said, shrugging,

“Mommy, Daddy, Leif.”

The valley behind the hills heats up,

vultures, red-tailed hawks floating in the bubbles

of warm air that pull the fog right in

from the ocean. You have to rise at sunup

to see it steaming through the Gate

in ghostly June. Later, on street corners,

you can hardly see the children, chirping

and shivering, each shrill voice climbing over

the next in an ascending chorus. “Wait, you guys,”

one little girl says, trying to be heard.

“Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.”

Bright clothes: the last buses of the term.

Richard arrives to read poems, the final guest

of a long spring. I thought of Little Shelford,

where we had seen him last. In the worked gold

of an English October, Kristin watched the neighbor's

horses wading in the meadow grass, while Leif

and I spiraled a football by the chalk-green,

moss-mortared ruin of the garden wall.

Mr. Acker, who had worked in the village

since he was a boy, touched his tweed cap

mournfully. “Reminds me of the war,” he said.

“Lots of Yanks here then.” Richard rolled a ball

to Luke, who had an old alphabet book

in which cherubic animals disported.

Richard was a rabbit with a roller.

Luke evidently thought that it was droll

or magical that Richard, commanded

by the power of the word, was crouching

under the horse chestnut, dangling

a hand-rolled cigarette and rolling him a ball.

He gave me secret, signifying winks, though

he could not quite close one eye at a time.

So many prisms to construct a moment!

Spiderwebs set at all angles on a hedge:

what Luke thought was going on, what Mr. Acker

saw, and Richard, who had recently divorced,

idly rolling a ball with someone else 's child,

healing slowly, as the neighbor's silky mare

who had had a hard birth in the early spring,

stood quiet in the field as May grew sweet,

her torn vagina healing. So many visions

intersecting at what we call the crystal

of a common world, all the growing and shearing,

all the violent breaks. on Richard's last night

in Berkeley, we drank late and drove home

through the city gardens in the hills. Light

glimmered on the bay. Night-blooming jasmine

gave a heavy fragrance to the air. Richard

studied the moonlit azaleas in silence.

I knew he had a flat in East London.

I wondered if he was envying my life.

“How did you ever get stuck in this nest

of gentlefolk?” he said. “Christ! It's lovely.

I shouldn't want to live in America.

I'd miss the despair of European men.”

Luke comes running into the house excited

to say that an Iceland poppy has “bloomed up.”

His parents, who are not getting along

especially well, exchange wry looks.

They had both forgotten, since small children

were supposed to love flowers, that they actually

do. And there is the pathos of the metaphor

or myth: irresistible flowering.

Everything rises from the dead in June.

There is some treasure hidden in the heart of summer

everyone remembers now, and they can't be sure

the lives they live in will discover it.

They remember the smells of childhood vacations.

The men buy maps, raffish hats. Some women

pray to it by wearing blouses

with small buttons you have to button patiently,

as if to say, this is not winter, not

the cold shudder of dressing in the dark.