The Apple Trees at Olema (21 page)

Little green involute fronds of fern at creekside.

And the sinewy clear water rushing over creekstone

of the palest amber, veined with a darker gold,

thinnest lines of gold rivering through the amber

like—ah, now we come to it.
We were not put on earth
,

the old man said, he was hacking into the crust

of a sourdough half loaf in his vehement, impatient way

with an old horn-handled knife,
to express ourselves
.

I knew he had seen whole cities leveled: also

that there had been a time of shame for him, outskirts

of a ruined town, half Baroque, half Greek Revival,

pediments of Flora and Hygeia from a brief eighteenth-century

health spa boom lying on the streets in broken chunks

and dogs scavenging among them. His one act of courage

then had been to drop pieces of bread or chocolate,

as others did, where a fugitive family of Jews

was rumored to be hiding.
I never raised my voice
,

of course
,
none of us did
. He sliced wedges of cheese

after the bread, spooned out dollops of sour jam

from some Hungarian plum, purple and faintly gingered.

Every day the bits of half-mildewed, dry, hard—

this is my invention—whitened chocolate, dropped furtively

into rubble by the abandoned outbuilding of some suburban

mechanic's shop—but I am sure he said chocolate—

and it comforted no one.
We talked in whispers
.

“
Someone is taking them.” “Yes
,”
Janos said
,

“
But it might just be the dogs.”
He set the table.

Shrugged. Janos was a friend from the university,

who fled east to join a people's liberation army,

died in Siberia somewhere.
Some of us whispered
“
art
,
”

he said.
Some of us
“
truth.” A debate with cut vocal chords
.

You have to understand that, for all we knew, the Germans

would be there forever
.
And if not the Germans
,
the Russians
.

Well
,
you don't
“
have to” understand anything
,
naturally
.

No one knew which way to jump
.
What we had was language
,

you see. Some said art
,
some said truth
.
Truth
,
of course
,

was death
. Clattered the plates down on the table.
No one
,

no one said
“
self-expression
.
” Well
,
you had your own forms

of indulgence
.
Didn't people in the forties say
“
man”

instead of
“
the self
?
”
I think I said.
I thought
“
the self
”

came in in 1949
. He laughed.
It's true. Man
,

we said
,
is the creature who is able to watch himself

eat his own shit from fear
.
You know what that is
?

Melodrama
.
I tell you
,
there is no bottom to self-pity
.

This comes back to me on the mountainside. Butterflies—

tiny blues with their two-dot wings like quotation marks

or an abandoned pencil sketch of a face. They hover lightly

over lupine blooms, whirr of insects in the three o'clock sun.

What about being
? I had asked him.
Isn't language responsible

to it
,
all of it
,
the texture of bread
,
the hairstyles

of the girls you knew in high school
,
shoelaces
,
sunsets
,

the smell of tea
?
Ah
, he said,
you've been talking to Milosz
.

To Czeslaw I say this
:
silence precedes us
.
We are catching up
.

I think he was quoting Jabès whom he liked to read.

Of course
,
here
, gesturing out the window, pines, ragged green

of a winter lawn, the bay,
you can express what you like
,

enumerate the vegetation
.
And you! you have to
,
I'm afraid
,

since you don't excel at metaphor
. A shrewd, quick glance

to see how I have taken this thrust.
You write well
,
clearly
.

You are an intelligent man
.
But
—finger in the air—

silence is waiting
.
Milosz believes there is a Word

at the end that explains
.
There is silence at the end
,

and it doesn't explain
,
it doesn't even ask
. He spread chutney

on his bread, meticulously, out to the corners. Something

angry always in his unexpected fits of thoroughness

I liked. Then cheese. Then a lunging, wolfish bite.

Put it this way
,
I give you
,
here
,
now
,
a magic key
.

What does it open
?
This key I give you
,
what exactly

does it open
?
Anything
,
anything! But what
? I found

that what I thought about was the failure of my marriage,

the three or four lost years just at the end and after.

For me there is no key
,
not even the sum total of our acts
.

But you are a poet
.
You pretend to make poems
.
And
?

She sat on the couch sobbing, her rib cage shaking

from its accumulated abysses of grief and thick sorrow.

I don't love you, she said. The terrible thing is

that I don't think I ever loved you. He thought to himself

fast, to numb it, that she didn't mean it, thought

what he had done to provoke it. It was May.

Also pines, lawn, the bay, a blossoming apricot.

Everyone their own devastation. Each on its own scale.

I don't know what the key opens. I know we die,

and don't know what is at the end. We don't behave well.

And there are monsters out there, and millions of others

to carry out their orders. We live half our lives

in fantasy, and words. This morning I am pretending

to be walking down the mountain in the heat.

A vault of blue sky, traildust, the sweet medicinal

scent of mountain grasses, and at trailside—

I'm a little ashamed that I want to end this poem

singing, but I want to end this poem singing—the wooly

closed-down buds of the sunflower to which, in English,

someone gave the name, sometime, of pearly everlasting.

In the long winter nights, a farmer's dreams are narrow.

Over and over, he enters the furrow.

October night, the sun going down,

Evening with its brown and blue

(Music from another room),

Evening with its blue and brown.

October night, the sun going down.

In one version of the legend the sirens couldn't sing.

It was only a sailor's story that they could.

So Odysseus, lashed to the mast, was harrowed

By a music that he didn't hear—plungings of sea,

Wind-sheer, the off-shore hunger of the birds—

And the mute women gathering kelp for garden mulch,

Seeing him strain against the cordage, seeing

The awful longing in his eyes, are changed forever

On their rocky waste of island by their imagination

Of his imagination of the song they didn't sing.

Poor Nietzsche in Turin, eating sausage his mother

Mails to him from Basel. A rented room,

A small square window framing August clouds

Above the mountain. Brooding on the form

Of things: the dangling spur

Of an Alpine columbine, winter-tortured trunks

Of cedar in the summer sun, the warp in the aspen's trunk

Where it torqued up through the snowpack.

“Everywhere the wasteland grows; woe

To him whose wasteland is within.”

Dying of syphilis. Trimming a luxuriant mustache.

In love with the opera of Bizet.

“Tender little Buddha,” she said

Of my least Buddha-like member.

She was probably quoting Allen Ginsberg,

Who was probably paraphrasing Walt Whitman.

After the Civil War, after the death of Lincoln,

That was a good time to own railroad stocks,

But Whitman was in the Library of Congress,

Researching alternative Americas,

Reading up on the curiosities of Hindoo philosophy,

Studying the etchings of stone carvings

Of strange couplings in a book.

She was taking off a blouse,

Almost transparent, the color of a silky tangerine.

From Capitol Hill Walt Whitman must have been able to see

Willows gathering the river haze

In the cooling and still-humid twilight.

He was in love with a trolley conductor

In the summer of—what was it?—1867? 1868?

1.

The first long shadows in the fields

Are like mortal difficulty.

The first birdsong is not like that at all.

2.

The light in summer is very young and wholly unsupervised.

No one has made it sit down to breakfast.

It's the first one up, the first one out.

3.

Because he has opened his eyes, he must be light

And she, sleeping beside him, must be the visible,

One ringlet of hair curled about her ear.

Into which he whispers, “Wake up!”

“Wake up!” he whispers.

Bedcovers thrown back,

Tangled sheets,

Lustrous in moonlight.

Image of delight,

or longing,

or torment,

Depending on who's

Doing the imagining.

(I know: you are the one

Pierced through, I'm the one

Bent low beside you, trying

To peer into your eyes.)

Her body by the fire

Mimicked the light-conferring midnights

of philosophy.

Suppose they are dead now.

Isn't “dead now” an odd expression?

The sound of the owls outside

And the wind soughing in the trees

Catches in their ears, is sent out

In scouting parties of sensation down their spines.

If you say it became language or it was nothing,

Who touched whom?

In what hurtle of starlight?

Poor language, poor theory

of language. The shards of skull

In the Egyptian museum looked like maps of the wind-eroded

Canyon labyrinths from which,

Standing on the verge

In the yellow of a dwindling fall, you hear

Echo and reecho the cries of terns

Fishing the worked silver of a rapids.

And what to say of her wetness? The Anglo-Saxons

Had a name for it. They called it silm.

They were navigators. It was also

Their word for the look of moonlight on the sea.

If I said—remembering in summer,

The cardinal's sudden smudge of red

In the bare gray winter woods—

If I said, red ribbon on the cocked straw hat

of the girl with pooched-out lips

Dangling a wiry lapdog

In the painting by Renoir—

If I said fire, if I said blood welling from a cut—

or flecks of poppy in the tar-grass scented summer air

on a wind-struck hillside outside Fano—

If I said, her one red earring tugging at her silky lobe,

If she tells fortunes with a deck of fallen leaves

Until it comes out right—

Rouged nipple, mouth—

(How could you not love a woman

Who cheats at the Tarot?)

Red, I said. Sudden, red.

The aspen glitters in the wind

And that delights us.

The leaf flutters, turning,

Because that motion in the heat of August

Protects its cells from drying out. Likewise the leaf

of the cottonwood.

The gene pool threw up a wobbly stem

And the tree danced. No.

The tree capitalized.

No. There are limits to saying,

In language, what the tree did.

It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us.

Dance with me, dancer. Oh, I will.

Mountains, sky,

The aspen doing something in the wind.

A sentence with “dappled shadow” in it.

Something not sayable

spurting from the morning silence,

secret as a thrush.

The other man, the officer, who brought onions

and wine and sacks of flour,

the major with the swollen knee,

wanted intelligent conversation afterward.

Having no choice, she provided that, too.

Potsdamer Platz, May 1945.

When the first one was through he pried her mouth open.

Bashō told Rensetsu to avoid sensational materials.

If the horror of the world were the truth of the world,

he said, there would be no one to say it

and no one to say it to.

I think he recommended describing the slightly frenzied

swarming of insects near a waterfall.

Pried her mouth open and spit in it.

We pass these things on,

probably, because we are what we can imagine.

Something not sayable in the morning silence.

The mind hungering after likenesses. “Tender sky,” etc.,

curves the swallows trace in air.

There's a lot to be written in the Book of Errors.

The elderly redactor is blind, for all practical purposes,

He has no imagination, and field mice have gnawed away

His source text for their nesting. I loved you first, I think,

When you stood in the kitchen sunlight and the lazy motes

Of summer dust while I sliced a nectarine for Moroccan salad

And the seven league boots of your private grief. Maybe

The syntax is a little haywire there. Left to itself,

Wire must act like Paul Klee with a pencil.
Hay

Is the old English word for
strike
. You strike down

Grass, I guess, when it is moan. Mown. The field mice

Devastated the monastery garden. Maybe because it was summer

And the dusks were full of marsh hawks and the nights were soft

With owls, they couldn't leave the herbs alone: gnawing the roots

Of rosemary, nibbling at sage and oregano and lemon thyme.

It's too bad
eglantine
isn't an herb, because it's a word

I'd like to use here. Her coloring was a hybrid

Of rubbed amber and the little flare of dawn rose in the kernel

Of an almond. It's a wonder to me that I have fingertips.

The knife was very sharp. The scented rose-orange moons,

Quarter moons, of fruit fell to the cutting board

So neatly it was as if two people lived in separate cities

And walked to their respective bakeries in the rain. Her bakery

Smelled better than his. The sour cloud of yeast from sourdough

Hung in the air like the odor of creation. They both bought

Sliced loaves, they both walked home, they both tripped

In the entry to their separate kitchens, and the spilled slices

Made the exact same pattern on the floor. The nectarines

Smelled like the Book of Luck. There was a little fog

Off the bay at sundown in which the waning moon swam laps.

The Miwoks called it Moon of the only Credit Card.

I would have given my fingertips to touch your cheekbone,

And I did. That night the old monk knocked off early. He was making it

All up anyway, and he 'd had a bit of raisin wine at vespers.

1. Terror of Beginnings

What are the habits of paradise?

It likes the light. It likes a few pines

on a mass of eroded rock in summer.

You can't tell up there if rock and air

Are the beginning or the end.

What would you do if you were me? she said.

If I were you-you, or if I were you-me?

If you were me-me.

If I were you-you, he said, I'd do exactly

What you're doing.

—All it is is sunlight on granite.

Pines casting shadows in the early sun.

Wind in the pines like the faint rocking

of a crucifix dangling

From a rear-view mirror at a stop sign.

2. The palmer method

The answer was

The sound of water,
what

What, what,
the sprinkler

Said, the question

Of resilvering the mirror

Or smashing it

Once and for all the

Tea in China-

Town getting out of this film

Noir intact or—damaged

As may be—with tact

Was not self-evident

(they fired the rewrite man).

Winters are always touch

And go, it rained,

It hovered on the cusp

Between a
drizzle

And a
shower
, it was

A reverie and inconsolable.

There but for the grace

Of several centuries

Of ruthless exploitation,

We said, hearing

Rumors, or maybe whimpers

From the cattle car—

The answer was within

A radius of several

Floor plans for the house

Desire was always building

And destroying, the

Produce man misted

Plums and apple-pears

The color of halogen

Street lamps in a puddle.

They trod as carefully

As haste permitted,

She wept beside him

In the night.

3. Habits of paradise

Maybe if I made the bed,

It would help. Would the modest diligence

Seem radiant, provoke a radiance?

(outside aspens glittering in the wind.)