The Apple Trees at Olema (15 page)

I don't even know which sadness

it was came up

in me when we were walking down the road to Shirley Lake,

the sun gleaming in snowpatches,

the sky so blue it seemed the light's dove

of some pentecost of blue,

the mimulus, yellow, delicate of petal,

and the pale yellow cinquefoil trembling in the damp

air above the creek,—

and fields of lupine,

that blue blaze of lupine, a swath of paintbrush

sheening it, and so much of it, long meadows

of it gathered out of the mountain air and spilling

down ridge toward the lake it almost looked like

in the wind. I think I must have thought

the usual things: that the flowering season

in these high mountain meadows is so brief, that

the feeling, something like hilarity, of sudden

pleasure when you first come across some tough little plant

you knew you'd see comes because it seems—I mean

by
it
the larkspur or penstemon curling

and arching the reach of its sexual being

up out of a little crack in granite—to say

that human hunger has a niche up here in the light-cathedral

of the dazzled air. I wanted to tell you

that when the ghost-child died, the three-month dreamer

she and I would never know, I kept feeling that

the heaven it went to was like the inside of a store window

on a rainy day from which you watch the blurred forms

passing in the street. or to tell you, more terrible,

that when she and I walked off the restlessness

of our misery afterward in the Coast Range hills,

we saw come out of the thicket shyly

a pure white doe. I wanted to tell you I knew

it was a freak of beauty like the law of averages

that killed our child and made us know, as you had said

that things between lovers, even of longest standing,

can be botched in their bodies, though their wills don't fail.

Still later, on the beach, we watched the waves.

No two the same size. No two in the same arch

of rising up and pouring. But it is the same law.

You shell a pea, there are three plump seeds and one

that's shriveled. You shell a bushelful and you begin

to feel the rhythms of the waves at Limantour,

glittering, jagged, that last bright October afternoon.

It killed something in me, I thought, or froze it,

to have to see where beauty comes from. I imagined

for a long time that the baby, since

it would have liked to smell our clothes to know

what a mother and father would have been,

hovered sometimes in our closet and I half-expected

to see it there, half-fish spirit, form of tenderness,

a little dead dreamer with open eyes. That was

private sorrow. I tried not to hate my life,

to fear the frame of things. I knew what two people

couldn't say

on a cold November morning in the fog—

you remember the feel of Berkeley winter mornings—

what they couldn't say to each other

was the white deer not seen. It meant to me

that beauty and terror were intertwined so powerfully

and went so deep that any kind of love

can fail. I didn't say it. I think the mountain startled

my small grief. Maybe there wasn't time.

We may have been sprinting to catch the tram

because we had to teach poetry

in that valley two thousand feet below us.

You were running—Steven's mother, Michael's lover,

mother and lover, grieving, of a girl

about to leave for school and die to you a little

(or die into you, or simply turn away)—

and you ran like a gazelle,

in purple underpants, royal purple,

and I laughed out loud. It was the abundance

the world gives, the more-than-you-bargained-for

surprise of it, waves breaking,

the sudden fragrance of the mimulus at creekside

sharpened by the summer dust.

Things bloom up there. They are

for their season alive in those bright vanishings

of the air we ran through.

Now goth sonne under wode—

Me reweth, Marie, thi faire rode.

Now goth sonne under tre—

Me reweth, Marie, thy sonne and thee.

—A
NONYMOUS, TWELFTH CENTURY

Because yesterday morning from the steamy window

we saw a pair of red foxes across the creek

eating the last windfall apples in the rain—

they looked up at us with their green eyes

long enough to symbolize the wakefulness of living things

and then went back to eating—

and because this morning

when she went into the gazebo with her black pen and yellow pad

to coax an inquisitive soul

from what she thinks of as the reluctance of matter,

I drove into town to drink tea in the café

and write notes in a journal—mist rose from the bay

like the luminous and indefinite aspect of intention,

and a small flock of tundra swans

for the second winter in a row was feeding on new grass

in the soaked fields; they symbolize mystery, I suppose,

they are also called whistling swans, are very white,

and their eyes are black—

and because the tea steamed in front of me,

and the notebook, turned to a new page,

was blank except for a faint blue idea of order,

I wrote:
happiness! it is December, very cold
,

we woke early this morning,

and lay in bed kissing,

our eyes squinched up like bats.

In white,

the unpainted statue of the young girl

on the side altar

made the quality of mercy seem scrupulous and calm.

When my mother was in a hospital drying out,

or drinking at a pace that would put her there soon,

I would slip in the side door,

light an aromatic candle,

and bargain for us both.

or else I'd stare into the day-moon of that face

and, if I concentrated, fly.

Come down! come down!

she 'd call, because I was so high.

Though mostly when I think of myself

at that age, I am standing at my older brother's closet

studying the shirts,

convinced that I could be absolutely transformed

by something I could borrow.

And the days churned by,

navigable sorrow.

1.

The people who lived here before us

also loved these high mountain meadows on summer mornings.

They made their way up here in easy stages

when heat began to dry the valleys out,

following the berry harvest probably and the pine buds:

climbing and making camp and gathering,

then breaking camp and climbing and making camp and gathering.

A few miles a day. They sent out the children

to dig up bulbs of the mariposa lilies that they liked to roast

at night by the fire where they sat talking about how this year

was different from last year. Told stories,

knew where they were on earth from the names,

owl moon, bear moon, gooseberry moon.

2.

Jaime de Angulo (1934) was talking to a Channel Island Indian

in a Santa Barbara bar. You tell me how your people said

the world was made. Well, the guy said, Coyote was on the mountain

and he had to pee. Wait a minute, Jaime said,

I was talking to a Pomo the other day and he said

Red Fox made the world. They say Red Fox, the guy shrugged,

we say Coyote. So, he had to pee

and he didn't want to drown anybody, so he turned toward the place

where the ocean would be. Wait a minute, Jaime said,

if there were no people yet, how could he drown anybody?

The Channelleño got a funny look on his face. You know,

he said, when I was a kid, I wondered about tha

and I asked my father. We were living up toward Santa Ynez.

He was sitting on a bench in the yard shaving down fence posts

with an ax, and I said, how come Coyote was worried about people

when he had to pee and there were no people? The guy laughed.

And my old man looked up at me with this funny smile

and said, You know, when I was a kid, I wondered about that.

3.

Thinking about that story just now, early morning heat,

first day in the mountains, I remembered stories about sick Indians

and—in the same thought—standing on the free throw line.

St. Raphael's parish, where the northernmost of the missions

had been, was founded as a hospital, was named for the angel

in the scriptures who healed the blind man with a fish

he laid across his eyes.—I wouldn't mind being that age again,

hearing those stories, eyes turned upward toward the young nun

in her white, fresh-smelling, immaculately laundered robes.—

The Franciscan priests who brought their faith in God

across the Atlantic, brought with the baroque statues and metalwork

crosses

and elaborately embroidered cloaks, influenza and syphilis and the

coughing disease.

Which is why we settled an almost empty California.

There were drawings in the mission museum of the long, dark wards

full of small brown people, wasted, coughing into blankets,

the saintly Franciscan fathers moving patiently among them.

It would, Sister Marietta said, have broken your hearts to see it.

They meant so well, she said, and such a terrible thing

came here with their love. And I remembered how I hated it

after school—because I loved basketball practice more than anything

on earth—that I never knew if my mother was going to show up

well into one of those weeks of drinking she disappeared into,

and humiliate me in front of my classmates with her bright, confident eyes,

and slurred, though carefully pronounced words, and the appalling

impromptu sets of mismatched clothes she was given to

when she had the dim idea of making a good impression in that state.

Sometimes from the gym floor with its sweet, heady smell of varnish

I'd see her in the entryway looking for me, and I'd bounce

the ball two or three times, study the orange rim as if it were,

which it was, the true level of the world, the one sure thing

the power in my hands could summon. I'd bounce the ball

once more, feel the grain of the leather in my fingertips and shoot.

It was a perfect thing; it was almost like killing her.

4.

When we say “mother” in poems,

we usually mean some woman in her late twenties

or early thirties trying to raise a child.

We use this particular noun

to secure the pathos of the child's point of view

and to hold her responsible.

5.

If you're afraid now?

Fear is a teacher.

Sometimes you thought that

nothing could reach her,

nothing can reach you.

Wouldn't you rather

sit by the river, sit

on the dead bank,

deader than winter,

where all the roots gape?

6.

This morning in the early sun,

steam rising from the pond the color of smoky topaz,

a pair of delicate, copper-red, needle-fine insects

are mating in the unopened crown of a Shasta daisy

just outside your door. The green flower heads look like wombs

or the upright, supplicant bulbs of a vegetal pre-erection.

The insect lovers seem to be transferring the cosmos into each other

by attaching at the tail, holding utterly still, and quivering intently.

I think (on what evidence?) that they are different from us.

That they mate and are done with mating.

They don't carry all this half-mated longing up out of childhood

and then go looking for it everywhere.

And so, I think, they can't wound each other the way we do.

They don't go through life dizzy or groggy with their hunger,

kill with it, smear it on everything, though it is perhaps also true

that nothing happens to them quite like what happens to us

when the blue-backed swallow dips swiftly toward the green pond

and the pond's green-and-blue reflected swallow marries it a moment

in the reflected sky and the heart goes out to the end of the rope

it has been throwing into abyss after abyss, and a singing shimmers

from every color the morning has risen into.

My insect instructors have stilled, they are probably stuck together

in some bliss and minute pulse of after-longing

evolution worked out to suck that last juice of the world

into the receiver body. They can't separate probably

until it is done.

They're where all displacement begins.

They bulldozed the upper meadow at Squaw valley,

where horses from the stable, two chestnuts, one white,

grazed in the mist and the scent of wet grass on summer mornings

and moonrise threw the owl's shadow on voles and wood rats

crouched in the sage smell the earth gave back after dark

with the day's heat to the night air.

And after the framers began to pound nails

and the electricians and plumbers came around to talk specs

with the general contractor, someone put up a green sign

with alpine daises on it that said Squaw valley Meadows.

They had gouged up the deep-rooted bunchgrass

and the wet alkali-scented earth had been pushed aside

or trucked someplace out of the way, and they poured concrete

and laid road—pleasant scent of tar in the spring sun—

“He wanted to get out of his head,” she said,

“so I told him to write about his mother's nipples.”

The cosmopolitan's song on this subject:

Alors! les nipples de ma mère!

The romantic's song

What could be more fair

than les nipples de ma mère?

The utopian's song

I will freely share

les nipples de ma mère.

The philosopher's song

Here was always there

with les nipples de ma mère

The capitalist's song

Fifty cents a share

The saint's song

Lift your eyes in prayer

The misanthrope's song

I can scarcely bear

The melancholic's song

They were never there,

les nipples de ma mère.

They are not anywhere.

The indigenist's song

And so the boy they called Loves His Mother's Tits

Went into the mountains and fasted for three days.

on the fourth he saw a red-tailed hawk with broken wings,

on the fifth a gored doe in a ravine, entrails

Spilled onto the rocks, eye looking up at him

From the twisted neck. All the sixth day he was dizzy

And his stomach hurt. on the seventh he made three deep cuts

In the meat of his palm. He entered the pain at noon

And an eagle came to him crying three times like the mewling

A doe makes planting her hooves in the soft duff for mating

And he went home and they called him Eagle Three Times after that.

The regionalist's song

Los Pechos.

Rolling oak woodland between Sierra pines

and the simmering valley.

Pink, of course, soft; a girl's—

she wore white muslin tennis outfits

in the style Helen Wills made fashionable.

Trim athletic swimsuits.

A small person, compact body. In the photographs

she 's on the beach, standing straight,

hands on hips, grinning,

eyes desperate even then.

Mothers in the nineteen forties didn't nurse.

I never saw her naked. oh! yes, I did,

once, but I can't remember. I remember

not wanting to.