The Apple Trees at Olema (14 page)

Many are making love. Up above, the angels

in the unshaken ether and crystal of human longing

are braiding one another's hair, which is strawberry blond

and the texture of cold rivers. They glance

down from time to time at the awkward ecstasy—

it must look to them like featherless birds

splashing in the spring puddle of a bed—

and then one woman, she is about to come,

peels back the man's shut eyelids and says,

look at me
, and he does. or is it the man

tugging the curtain rope in that dark theater?

Anyway, they do, they look at each other;

two beings with evolved eyes, rapacious,

startled, connected at the belly in an unbelievably sweet

lubricious glue, stare at each other,

and the angels are desolate. They hate it. They shudder pathetically

like lithographs of Victorian beggars

with perfect features and alabaster skin hawking rags

in the lewd alleys of the novel.

All of creation is offended by this distress.

It is like the keening sound the moon makes sometimes,

rising. The lovers especially cannot bear it,

it fills them with unspeakable sadness, so that

they close their eyes again and hold each other, each

feeling the mortal singularity of the body

they have enchanted out of death for an hour or so,

and one day, running at sunset, the woman says to the man,

I woke up feeling so sad this morning because I realized

that you could not, as much as I love you,

dear heart, cure my loneliness,

wherewith she touched his cheek to reassure him

that she did not mean to hurt him with this truth.

And the man is not hurt exactly,

he understands that life has limits, that people

die young, fail at love,

fail of their ambitions. He runs beside her, he thinks

of the sadness they have gasped and crooned their way out of

coming, clutching each other with old, invented

forms of grace and clumsy gratitude, ready

to be alone again, or dissatisfied, or merely

companionable like the couples on the summer beach

reading magazine articles about intimacy between the sexes

to themselves, and to each other,

and to the immense, illiterate, consoling angels.

White daisies against the burnt orange of the windowframe,

lusterless redwood in the nickel gray of winter,

in the distance turbulence of water—the green regions

of the morning reflect whatever can be gained, normally,

by light, then give way to the blue regions of the afternoon

which do not reflect so much as they remember,

as if the light, one will all morning, yielded to a doubleness

in things—plucked skins of turkeys in an ill-lit butchershop

in the pitch-dark forenoon of a dreary day, or a stone bridge

in a small town, a cool café, tables with a violin-back sheen,

ferns like private places of the body distanced and made cool—

images not quite left behind rising as an undertow

of endless transformation against the blurring world

outside the window where, after the morning clarities,

the faint reflection of a face appears; among the images

a road, repetitively, with meadow rue and yarrow

whitening its edges, and pines shadowing the cranberry brush,

and the fluting of one bird where the road curves and disappears,

becoming that gap or lack which is the oldest imagination

of need, defined more sharply by the silver-gray region

just before the sun goes down and the clouds fade

through rose to bruise to the city-pigeon color of a sky

going dark and the wind comes up in brushstroke silhouettes

of trees and to your surprise the window mirrors back to you

a face open, curious, and tender; as dance is defined

by the body's possibilities arranged, this dance

belongs to the composures and the running down of things

in the used sugars of five thirty: a woman straightening

a desk turns her calendar to another day, signaling

that it is another day where the desk is concerned

and that there is in her days what doesn't belong to the desk;

a kid turns on TV, flops on the couch to the tinny sound

of little cartoon parents quarreling; a man in a bar

orders a drink, watches ice bob in the blond fluid,

he sighs and looks around; sad at the corners, nagged by wind,

others with packages; others dreaming, picking their noses

dreamily while they listen to the radio describe configurations

of the traffic they are stuck in as the last light

like held breath flickers among mud hens on the bay,

the black bodies elapsing as the dark comes on, and the face

in the window seems harder and more clear. The religion

or the region of the dark makes soup and lights a fire,

plays backgammon with children on the teeth or the stilettos

of the board, reads books, does dishes, listens

to the wind, listens to the stars imagined to be singing

invisibly, goes out to be regarded by the moon, walks

dogs, feeds cats, makes love in postures so various,

with such varying attention and intensity and hope,

it enacts the dispersion of tongues among the people

of the earth—
compris? Versteh
'—and sleeps with sticky genitals

the erasures and the peace of sleep: exactly the half-moon

holds, and the city twinkles in particular windows, throbs

in its accumulated glow which is also and more blindingly

the imagination of need from which the sun keeps rising into morning light,

because desires do not split themselves up, there is one desire

touching the many things, and it is continuous.

What summer proposes is simply happiness:

heat early in the morning, jays

raucous in the pines. Frank and Ellen have a tennis game

at nine, Bill and Cheryl sleep on the deck

to watch a shower of summer stars. Nick and Sharon

stayed in, sat and talked the dark on,

drinking tea, and Jeanne walked into the meadow

in a white smock to write in her journal

by a grazing horse who seemed to want the company.

Some of them will swim in the afternoon.

Someone will drive to the hardware store to fetch

new latches for the kitchen door. Four o'clock;

the joggers jogging—it is one of them who sees

down the flowering slope the woman with her notebook

in her hand beside the white horse, gesturing, her hair

from a distance the copper color of the hummingbirds

the slant light catches on the slope; the hikers

switchback down the canyon from the waterfall;

the readers are reading, Anna is about to meet Vronsky,

that nice M. Swann is dining in Combray

with the aunts, and Carrie has come to Chicago.

What they want is happiness: someone to love them,

children, a summer by the lake. The woman who sets aside

her book blinks against the fuzzy dark,

reentering the house. Her daughter drifts downstairs;

out late the night before, she has been napping,

and she 's cross. Her mother tells her David telephoned.

“He's such a dear,” the mother says, “I think

I make him nervous.” The girl tosses her head as the horse

had done in the meadow while Jeanne read it her dream.

“You can call him now, if you want,” the mother says,

“I've got to get the chicken started,

I won't listen.” “Did I say you would?”

the girl says quickly. The mother who has been slapped

this way before and done the same herself another summer

on a different lake says, “ouch.” The girl shrugs

sulkily. “I'm sorry.” Looking down: “Something

about the way you said that pissed me off.”

“Hannibal has wandered off,” the mother says,

wryness in her voice, she is thinking it is August,

“why don't you see if he 's at the Finleys' house

again.” The girl says, “God.” The mother: “He loves

small children. It's livelier for him there.”

The daughter, awake now, flounces out the door,

which slams. It is for all of them the sound of summer.

The mother she looks like stands at the counter snapping beans.

What if I did not mention death to get started

or how love fails in our well-meaning hands

or what my parents in the innocence of their malice

toward each other did to me. What if I let the light

pour down on the mountain meadow, mule ears

dry already in the August heat, and the sweet

heavy scent of sage rising into it, marrying

what light it can, a wartime marriage,

summer is brief in these mountains, the

ticker-tape parade of snow will bury it

in no time, in the excess the world gives

up there, and down here, you want snow? you think

you have seen infinity watching the sky shuffle

the pink cards of thirty thousand flamingoes

on the Serengeti Plain? this is my blush,

she said, turning toward you, eyes downcast

demurely, a small smile playing at her mouth,

playing what? house, playing I am the sister

and author of your sorrow, playing the Lord

God loves the green earth and I am a nun

of his visitations, you want snow, I'll give you

snow, she said, this is my flamingoes-in-migration

blush. Winter will bury it. You had better

sleep through that cold, or sleep in a solitary bed

in a city where the stone glistens darkly

in the morning rain, you are allowed a comforter,

silky in texture though it must be blue,

and you can listen to music in the morning,

the notes nervous as light reflected in a fountain,

and you can drink your one cup of fragrant tea

and rinse the cup and sweep your room and

the sadness you are fighting off while the gulls'

calls beat about the church towers out the window

and you smell the salt smell of the sea

is the dream you don't remember of the meadow

sleeping under fifteen feet of snow though you half

recall the tracks of some midsized animal,

a small fox or a large hare, and the deadly

silence, and the blinded-eye gray of the winter sky:

it is sleeping, the meadow, don't wake it.

You have to go to the bottom of the raveling.

The surgical pan, and the pump, and the bits

of life that didn't take floating in the smell

of alcohol, or the old man in the bed spitting up

black blood like milk of the other world, or the way

middle-aged women from poorer countries are the ones

who clean up after and throw the underwear away.

Hang on to the luxury of the way she used

to turn to you, don't abandon it, summer

is short, no one ever told you differently,

this is a good parade, this is the small hotel,

the boathouse on the dock, and the moon thin,

just silvering above the pines, and you are starting

to sweat now, having turned north out of the meadow

and begun the ascent up granite and through buckthorn

to the falls. There is a fine film on your warm skin

that you notice. You are water, light and water and thin air,

and you're breathing deeply now—a little dead marmot

like a rag of auburn hair swarms with ants beside the trail—

and you can hear the rush of water in the distance

as it takes its leap into the air and falls. In the winter

city she is walking toward you or away from you,

the fog condensing and dripping from the parapets

of old apartments and from the memory of intimate garments

that dried on the balcony in summer, even in the spring.

Do you understand? You can brew your one cup of tea

and you can drink it, the leaves were grown in Ceylon,

the plump young man who packed them was impatient,

he is waiting for news of a scholarship to Utrecht,

he is pretty sure he will rot in this lousy place

if he doesn't get it, and you can savor the last sip,

rinse the cup, and put it on the shelf,

and then you go outside or you sit down at the desk.

You go into yourself, the sage scent rising in the heat.

When I ran, it rained. Late in the afternoon—

midsummer, upstate New York, mornings I wrote,

read Polish history, and there was a woman

whom I thought about; outside the moody, humid

American sublime—late in the afternoon,

toward sundown, just as the sky was darkening,

the light came up and redwings settled in the cattails.

They were death's idea of twilight, the whole notes

of a requiem the massed clouds croaked

above the somber fields.
Lady of eyelashes
,

do you hear me? Whiteness, otter's body,

coolness of the morning, rubbed amber

and the skin's salt, do you hear me? This is Poland speaking,

“era of the dawn of freedom,” nineteen twenty-two.

When I ran, it rained. The blackbirds settled

their clannish squabbles in the reeds, and light came up.

First darkening, then light. And then pure fire.

Where does it come from? out of the impure

shining that rises from the soaked odor of the grass,

the levitating, Congregational, meadow-light-at-twilight

light that darkens the heavy-headed blossoms

of wild carrot, out of that, out of nothing

it boils up, pools on the horizon, fissures up,

igniting the undersides of clouds: pink flame,

red flame, vermilion, purple, deeper purple, dark.

You could wring the sourness of the sumac from the air,

the fescue sweetness from the grass, the slightly

maniacal cicadas tuning up to tear the fabric

of the silence into tatters, so that night,

if it wants to, comes as a beggar to the door

at which, if you do not offer milk and barley

to the maimed figure of the god, your well will foul,

your crops will wither in the fields. In the eastern marches

children know the story that the aspen quivers

because it failed to hide the virgin and the Child

when Herod's hunters were abroad. Think: night is the god

dressed as the beggar drinking the sweet milk.

Gray beard, thin shanks, the look in the eyes

idiot, unbearable, the wizened mouth agape,

like an infant's that has cried and sucked and cried

and paused to catch its breath. The pink nubbin

of the nipple glistens. I'll suckle at that breast,

the one in the song of the muttering illumination

of the fields before the sun goes down, before

the black train crosses the frontier from Prussia

into Poland in the age of the dawn of freedom.

Fifty freight cars from America, full of medicine

and the latest miracle, canned food.

The war is over. There are unburied bones

in the fields at sunup, skylarks singing,

starved children begging chocolate on the tracks.