The Apple Trees at Olema (4 page)

“Another night she said, ‘Do you know

what our countrymen are thinking about right now?

Football matches.' ‘Games,' I said. She shook her head.

‘The drones in Afghanistan? Yesterday they bombed a wedding.

It killed sixty people, eighteen children. I don't know

how people live, I don't know how

they get up in the morning.'”

“So she took the job in Harare and I got ready

to come back to Berkeley, and we said we 'd be in touch

by e-mail and that I might come out in the summer

and we'd see how it went. The last night

I was the one who woke up. She was sleeping soundly,

her face adorably squinched up by the pillow,

a little saliva—the English word
spittle
came to mind—

a tiny filament of it connecting the corner of her mouth

to the pillow. She looked so peaceful.”

“In the last week we went to hear a friend

perform some music of Benjamin Britten.

I had been in the library finishing up, ploughing

through the back issues of
The Criterion and noticing

again that neither Eliot nor any of the others

seemed to have had a clue to the coming horror.

She was sitting beside me and I looked at her hands

in her lap. Her beautiful hands. And I thought about

the way she was carrying the whole of the world's violence

and cruelty in her body, or trying to, because

she thought the rest of us couldn't or wouldn't.

our friend was bowing away, a series of high, sweet,

climbing and keening notes, and that line of Eliot's

from The Wasteland came into my head:

‘This music crept by me upon the waters
.'”

A boy walks out in the morning with a gun.

Bright air, the smell of grass and leaves

and reeds around the pond October smells.

A scent of apples from the orchard in the air.

A smell of ducks. Two cinnamon teal,

he thinks they are teal, the ones he'd seen

the night before as the pond darkened

and he'd thought the thought that the dark

was coming earlier. He is of an age

when the thought of winter is a sexual thought,

the having thoughts of one's own is sexual,

the two ducks muttering and gliding

toward the deeper reeds away from him,

as if distance were a natural courtesy,

is sexual, which is to say, a mystery, an ache

inside his belly and his chest that rhymes

somehow with the largeness of the night.

The stars conjuring themselves from nothing

but the dark, as if to say it's not as if

they weren't all along just where they were,

ached in the suddenly swifter darkening

and glittering and cold. He's of an age

when the thought of thinking is, at night,

a sexual thought. This morning in the crystal

of the air, dew, and the sunlight that the dew

has caught on the grass blades sparkling at his feet,

he stalks the pond. Three larger ducks,

mallards probably, burst from the reeds

and wheel and fly off south. Three redwings,

gone to their winter muteness, fly three ways

across the pond to settle on three cattails

opposite or crossways from each other,

perch and shiver into place and look around.

That's when he sees the snowy egret

in the rushes, pure white and stone still

and standing on one leg in that immobile,

perfect, almost princely way. He 'd seen it

often in the summer, often in the morning

and sometimes at dusk, hunting the reeds

under the sumac shadows on the far bank.

He'd watched the slow, wide fanning

of its wings, taking off and landing,

the almost inconceivably slow way

it raised one leg and then another

when it was stalking, the quick cocking

of its head at sudden movement in the water,

and the swift, darting sureness when it stabbed

the water for a stickleback or frog. once

he'd seen it, head up, swallowing a gopher,

its throat bulging, a bit of tail and a trickle

of blood just visible below the black beak.

Now it was still and white in the brightness

of the morning in the reeds. He liked

to practice stalking, and he raised the gun

to his shoulder and crouched in the wet grasses

and drew his bead just playfully at first.

L. had returned from a visit to the town

where he had lived for many years

with the wife and in the marriage he was leaving.

His task was to walk through the house

and mark things of his for the movers

(he 'd taken a job in another town)

and those of their common possessions

they had agreed he would take with him

into the new life. His wife had said,

“Take what you want,” and he understood

that she meant by this to say to him

that things were not the cause of her anger

or her hurt. His son, who was a senior

in high school, was also angry

and protective of his mother, who was,

after all, the one being abandoned.

L. understood that. He even thought

that his son's loyalty to his mother

was a good thing up to a point. The son,

when he'd heard the news, had acted as if

he'd been kicked in the stomach, then flared

and accused his father of selfishness,

of breaking up the family over personal feelings,

but he had also, like young men of his generation,

been raised a feminist and he had made himself

face the fact that, if his mother had a right

to her own life, like Nora in the Ibsen play

his drama class had performed the year before,

so did his father, and that he had to tell him so,

which he did, a week later, and on the phone,

a call L. would also associate with the unreal blue

of the mounded snow outside his new office

with its weather of another world. He arrived

on a Friday afternoon and stayed at a hotel

in the center of town. It was an odd sensation,

and not unpleasant, like the lightness

he had been feeling intermittently since

he'd left some months before, alongside

the heavy & incessant grief. He spent an hour

in his old gym, watching Iraqi women

in black shawls howling over their dead

on TV while he ran between two young women

on treadmills, and thought, as he often thought

those days, of the incommensurability

of kinds of suffering, and afterward,

he walked across the street to a shop

where he 'd sometimes found interesting objects.

There was an old red Chinese dragon

in the window, spangled with yellow

and green, the paint chipped but unfaded,

some kind of water god, he thought,

or river god that saved you from drowning

or caused you to drown, he couldn't

remember which. on its face there was

an expression of glee, ferocious glee.

He considered buying it as a gift

for his son and decided it was not

a time to touch symbolism he didn't

understand. That night, as planned, he saw his son

in
The Tempest
. He 'd sat alone near the back

of the theater and tried not to feel anything

except pleasure in the children and the play,

in which his son's girlfriend had the part of Miranda

to his Prospero. She was a gamin-faced girl,

wide-browed with ash blond hair, who more than a little

resembled L.'s wife (something they had both remarked,

amused, a year before) and who brought the house down

with Miranda's line. The audience, L. thought,

in a university town mostly knew it was coming,

but when she stood, flower-bedecked, center stage,

and lifted herself on tiptoe as she said it

in a slightly hoarse and boyish voice, the audience

howled with delight. Afterward they also murmured

audibly when his son, also center stage, adorable

and a little ludicrous in his wispy wizard's beard,

intoned his line, held out a wooden wand between his hands,

and broke it with a loud snap to abjure the magic.

L.'s wife sat in the middle of the second row.

He watched her greet many of their casual friends,

colleagues, parents of their son's friends

he'd sat in the back to avoid having to greet.

He'd brought flowers, and seeing that his wife had, too,

he decided to leave his under his seat. He waved

at his son, unbearded now and milling on stage

with the rest of the cast, gave him a thumbs up,

and drove his rental car back to the hotel.

In the morning, at ten, they'd gone through the house.

His son had answered the door, the three of them

had coffee in the kitchen and talked about the play.

His wife said not much and he concentrated

on ignoring her anger and the devastating sorrow

welling up inside him. Going through the house,

they'd had no issues except for one bowl

that they'd both remembered being the one

to spot in an antique store on the Mendocino road

twenty years before when they were quite poor

and the bowl, earthy, a luminous brown-gold,

from a famous ceramist's studio in Cornwall,

had been a plunge. (They'd made love

in the upstairs room of a bed-and-breakfast,

he involuntarily remembered, with an ocean view

and at breakfast they had heard Pachelbel's canon

for the first time with its stunned, slow, stately beauty

and went walking to look for coastal flowers,

lupine and heal-all and vetch, to fill the bowl with,

and then somehow bickered away through the afternoon

while they walked on the storm-littered beach.)

His wife looked at it a long time, arms crossed,

and then shrugged forcefully as if to say, take it

if you want it, since you've taken everything else,

and so, nettled by what he thought

was passive-aggressive in her manner, he had.

Later he found there wasn't a way to describe

to his lover or to his friends the moment

when he turned to his wife to say, again,

how sorry he was, and how she had seen it

coming and raised a palm and said, “Please, don't,”

and how his son had walked him to the door

and how, sitting in the car outside his house

of many years while his son disappeared inside,

he'd felt unable to move, stuck in some deep well

of dry sorrow, staring at the cold early blossoms

of the plum trees and at the carelessly lovely look

of the gardens his neighbors had, in the West Coast way,

labored over, until shame made him start the car

and drive it to the airport. Home again, in his new apartment

on the other side of the continent, fumbling

for his key in the humid night, he almost tripped

over the cat that came bounding out of the shadows

to greet him. It belonged to his new neighbor,

a professor of philosophy who'd written a book

about lying which he had tried to read

when he was sorting out the evasions and outright lies

his infidelity entailed. The cat was named Cat

and it was blind. It was rubbing its gray flank

against his ankles and purring, looking up at him

and purring and winking its occluded, milky eyes.

She opened the door before he did. She had put on

one of his shirts and was warm and smelled of sleep.

He scooped up the cat and tossed it in the hall

And then he hugged her. When she asked him, only half-awake,

how it had gone, he 'd said, “Fine. Not easy.”

and she had touched his cheek and said, “Poor baby”

and padded down the hall and back to bed.

A few nights later, after they'd made love,

he dozed and woke thinking about his son.

They had tossed off the sheets in the warm room

and when he glanced aside he was startled

to see that her body, curled naked beside him,

lustrous in the moonlight, was crisscrossed

with black shadows from the blinds. His body too.

It made them, made everything, seem vulnerable.

There was a light still on in the kitchen, and he slipped

from bed and walked down the hall to turn it off.

They'd also left the TV on, soldiers in desert camouflage

leaning against a wall. He turned that off, too,

and walked back down the hall, climbed into bed,

covered them both, lay down, and listened to the rhythm

of her breathing. After a while he entered it and slept.

1.

I won't say much for the sea,

except that it was, almost,

the color of sour milk.

The sun in that clear

unmenacing sky was low,

angled off the gray fissure of the cliffs,

hills dark green with manzanita.

Low tide: slimed rocks

mottled brown and thick with kelp

merged with the gray stone

of the breakwater, sliding off

to antediluvian depths.

The old story: here filthy life begins.

2.

Fish—

ing, as Melville said,

“to purge the spleen,”

to put to task my clumsy hands

my hands that bruise by

not touching

pluck the legs from a prawn,

peel the shell off,

and curl the body twice about a hook.

3.

The cabezone is not highly regarded

by fishermen, except Italians

who have the grace

to fry the pale, almost bluish flesh

in olive oil with a sprig

of fresh rosemary.

The cabezone, an ugly atavistic fish,

as old as the coastal shelf

it feeds upon

has fins of duck's-web thickness,

resembles a prehistoric toad,

and is delicately sweet.

Catching one, the fierce quiver of surprise

and the line 's tension

are a recognition.

4.

But it's strange to kill

for the sudden feel of life.

The danger is

to moralize

that strangeness.

Holding the spiny monster in my hands

his bulging purple eyes

were eyes and the sun was

almost tangent to the planet

on our uneasy coast.

Creature and creature,

we stared down centuries.

Amateurs, we gathered mushrooms

near shaggy eucalyptus groves

which smelled of camphor and the fog-soaked earth.

Chanterelles, puffballs, chicken of the woods,

we cooked in wine or butter,

beaten eggs or sour cream,

half-expecting to be

killed by a mistake. “Intense perspiration,”

you said late at night,

quoting the terrifying field guide

while we lay tangled in our sheets and heavy limbs,

“is the first symptom of attack.”

Friends called our aromatic fungi

liebestoads
and only ate the ones

that we most certainly survived.

Death shook us more than once

those days and floating back

it felt like life. Earth-wet, slithery,

we drifted toward the names of things.

Spore prints littered our table

like nervous stars. Rotting caps

gave off a musky smell of loam.

Sourdough French bread and pinot chardonnay

Apricots—

the downy buttock shape

hard black sculpture of the limbs

on Saratoga hillsides in the rain.

These were the staples of the China trade:

sea otter, sandalwood, and bêche-de-mer

The pointillist look of laurels

their dappled pale green body stirs

down valley in the morning wind

Daphne was supple

my wife is tan, blue-rippled

pale in the dark hollows

Kit Carson in California:

it was the eyes of fish

that shivered in him the tenderness of eyes

he watched the ships come in

at Yerba Buena once, found obscene

the intelligence of crabs

their sidelong crawl, gulls

screeching for white meat,

flounders in tubs, startled

Musky fall—

slime of a saffron milkcap

the mottled amanita

delicate phallic toxic

How odd

the fruity warmth of zinfandel

geometries of “rational viticulture”

Plucked from algae sea spray

cold sun and a low rank tide

sea cucumbers

lolling in the crevices of rock

they traded men enough

to carve old Crocker's railway out of rock

to eat these slugs

bêche-de-mer

The night they bombed Hanoi

we had been drinking red pinot

that was winter the walnut tree was bare

and the desert ironwood where waxwings

perched in spring drunk on pyracantha

squalls headwinds days gone

north on the infelicitous Pacific

The bleak intricate erosion of these cliffs

seas grown bitter

with the salt of continents

Jerusalem artichokes

raised on sandy bluffs at San Gregorio

near reedy beaches where the steelhead ran

Coast range runoff turned salt creek

in the heat and indolence of August

That purple in the hills

owl's clover stiffening the lupine

while the white flowers of the pollinated plant

seep red

the eye owns what is familiar

felt along the flesh

“an amethystine tinge”

Chants, recitations:

Olema

Tamalpais Mariposa

Mendocino Sausalito San Rafael

Emigrant Gap

Donner Pass

of all the laws

that bind us to the past

the names of things are

stubbornest

Late summer—

red berries darken the hawthorns

curls of yellow in the laurels

your body and the undulant

sharp edges of the hills

Clams, abalones, cockles, chitons, crabs

Ishi

in San Francisco, 1911:

it was not the sea he wondered at

that inland man who saw the salmon

die to spawn and fed his dwindling people

from their rage to breed

it was the thousands of white bodies

on the beach

“Hansi saltu…” so many

ghosts

The long ripple in the swamp grass

is a skunk

he shuns the day

How often we overslept

those gray enormous mornings

in the first year of marriage

and found that rain and wind

had scattered palm nuts,

palm leaves, and sweet rotting crab apples

across our wildered lawn.

By spring your belly was immense

and your coloring a high rosy almond.

We were so broke

we debated buying thumbtacks

at the Elmwood Dime Store

knowing cellophane tape would do.

Berkeley seemed more innocent

in those flush days

when we skipped lunch

to have the price of
Les Enfants du Paradis
.

A statuary Christ bleeds sweating grief

in the Gethsemane garden of St. Boniface Church

where empurpled Irish winos lurch

to their salvation. When incense and belief

will not suffice: ruby port in the storm

of muscatel-made images of hell

the city spews at their shuffling feet.

In the Longshoreman's Hall across the street,

three decades have unloaded since the fight

to oust the manic Trotskyite

screwballs from the brotherhood. All goes well

since the unions closed their ranks,

boosted their pensions, and hired the banks

to manage funds for the workingman's cartel.

Christ in plaster, the unions minting coin,

old hopes converge upon the Tenderloin

where Comte, Considérant, Fourier

are thick with dust in the two-bit tray

of cavernous secondhand bookstores

and the streets suffuse the ten-cent howl

of jukebox violence, just this side of blues.

Negro boy-whores in black tennis shoes

prowl in front of noisy hustler bars.

Like Samuel Gompers, they want more

on this street where every other whore

is painfully skinny, wears a bouffant,

and looks like a brown slow-blooming annual flower.

In the places that I haunt, no power

to transform the universal squalor

nor wisdom to withstand the thin wrists

of the girls who sell their bodies for a dollar

or two, the price of a Collected Maeterlinck.

The sky glowers. My God, it is a test,

this riding out the dying of the West.

We bought great ornamental oranges,

Mexican cookies, a fragrant yellow tea.

Browsed the bookstores. You

asked mildly, “Bob, who is Ugo Betti?”

A bearded birdlike man

(he looked like a Russian priest

with imperial bearing

and a black ransacked raincoat)

turned to us, cleared

his cultural throat, and

told us both interminably

who Ugo Betti was. The slow

filtering of sun through windows

glazed to gold the silky hair

along your arms. Dusk was

a huge weird phosphorescent beast

dying slowly out across the bay.

our house waited and our books,

the skinny little soldiers on the shelves.

After dinner I read one anyway.

You chanted, “Ugo Betti has no bones,”

and when I said, “The limits of my language

are the limits of my world,” you laughed.

We spoke all night in tongues,

in fingertips, in teeth.

Afternoon cooking in the fall sun—

who is more naked

than the man

yelling, “Hey, I'm home!”

to an empty house?

thinking because the bay is clear,

the hills in yellow heat,

& scrub oak red in gullies

that great crowds of family

should tumble from the rooms

to throw their bodies on the Papa-body,

I-am-loved.

Cat sleeps in the windowgleam,

dust motes.

on the oak table

filets of sole

stewing in the juice of tangerines,

slices of green pepper

on a bone-white dish.

For Mariana Richardson (1830–1891)

1.

She dreamed along the beaches of this coast.

Here where the tide rides in to desolate

the sluggish margins of the bay,

sea grass sheens copper into distances.

Walking, I recite the hard

explosive names of birds:

egret, killdeer, bittern, tern.

Dull in the wind and early morning light,

the striped shadows of the cattails

twitch like nerves.

2.

Mud, roots, old cartridges, and blood.

High overhead, the long silence of the geese.

3.

“We take no prisoners,” John Frémont said

and took California for President Polk.

That was the Bear Flag War.

She watched it from the Mission San Rafael,

named for the archangel (the terrible one)

who gently laid a fish across the eyes

of saintly, miserable Tobias

that he might see.

The eyes of fish. The land

shimmers fearfully.

No archangels here, no ghosts,

and terns rise like seafoam

from the breaking surf.

Kit Carson's antique .45, blue,

new as grease. The roar

flings up echoes,

row on row of shrieking avocets.

The blood of Francisco de Haro,

Ramón de Haro, José de los Reyes Berryessa

runs darkly to the old ooze.

5.

The star thistles: erect, surprised,

6.

and blooming

violet caterpillar hairs. one

of the de Haros was her lover,

the books don't say which.

They were twins.

7.

In California in the early spring

there are pale yellow mornings

when the mist burns slowly into day.

The air stings

like autumn, clarifies

like pain.

8.

Well I have dreamed this coast myself.

Dreamed Mariana, since her father owned the land

where I grew up. I saw her picture once:

a wraith encased in a high-necked black silk

dress so taut about the bones there were hardly ripples

for the light to play in. I knew her eyes

had watched the hills seep blue with lupine after rain,

seen the young peppers, heavy and intent,

first rosy drupes and then the acrid fruit,

the ache of spring. Black as her hair

the unreflecting venom of those eyes

is an aftermath I know, like these brackish,

russet pools a strange life feeds in

or the old fury of land grants, maps,

and deeds of trust. A furious dun-

colored mallard knows my kind

and skims across the edges of the marsh

where the dead bass surface

and their flaccid bellies bob.