The Apple Trees at Olema (16 page)
Read The Apple Trees at Olema Online
Authors: Robert Hass
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Some years later. I am perhaps ten, eleven. We are visiting my mother on the parklike grounds of the State Hospital in the Napa Valley. It is Sunday again. Green lawns, the heavy sweet scent of mock orange. Many of the patients are walking, alone or with their families, on the paths. One man seemed to be giving speeches to a tree. I had asked my grandmother why, if my mother had a drinking problem, that's the phrase I had been taught to use, why she was locked up with crazy people. It was a question I could have asked my father, but I understood that his answer would not be dependable. My grandmother said, with force, she had small red curls on her forehead, dressed with great style, you had better ask your father that. Then she thought better of it, and said, They have a treatment program, dear, maybe it will help. I tried out that phrase, treatment program. My mother was sitting on a bench. She looked immensely sad, seemed to have shrunk. Her hair was pulled across her forehead and secured with a white barrette, like Teresa Wright in the movies. At first my brother and I just sat next to her on the bench and cried. My father held my sister's hand. My grandmother and grandfather stood to one side, a separate group, and watched.
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Later, while they talked I studied a middle-aged woman sitting on the next bench talking to herself in a foreign language. She was wearing
a floral print dress and she spoke almost in a whisper but with passion, looking around from time to time, quick little furtive resentful glances. She was so careless of herself that I could see her breast, the brown nipple, when she leaned forward. I didn't want to look, and looked, and looked away.
Hot Sierra morning.
Brenda working in another room.
Rumble of heavy equipment in the meadow,
bird squall, Steller's jay, and then
the piercing three-note whistle of a robin.
They're mating now. otherwise they're mute.
Mother-ing. or Mother-song.
Mother-song-song-song.
We used to laugh, my brother and I in college,
about the chocolate cake. Tears in our eyes laughing.
In grammar school, whenever she 'd start to drink,
she panicked and made amends by baking chocolate cake.
And, of course, when we got home, we'd smell the strong, sweet smell
of the absolute darkness of chocolate,
and be too sick to eat it.
The first girl's breasts I saw
were the Chevy dealer's daughter Linda Wren's.
Pale in the moonlight. Little nubbins, pink-nosed.
I can still hear the slow sound of the surf
of my breath drawing in. I think I almost fainted.
Twin fonts of mercy
, they used to say of the virgin's breasts
in the old liturgy the Irish priests
could never quite handle, it being a form of bodily reference,
springs of grace, freshets
of loving-kindness.
If I remember correctly,
there are baroque poems in this spirit
in which each of Christ's wounds is a nipple.
Drink and live: this is the son's blood.
Dried figs, candied roses.
What is one to say of the nipples of old women
who would, after all, find the subject
unseemly.
Yesterday I ran along the edge of the meadow in the heat
of late afternoon. So many wildflowers
tangled in the grass. So many grassesâ
reedgrass, the bentgrass and timothy, little quaking grass,
dogtail, ripgut bromeâthe seeds flaring from the stalks
in tight chevrons of green and purple-green
but loosening.
I said to myself:
some things do not blossom in this life.
I said: what we've lost is a story
and what we've never had
a song.
When my father died, I was curious to see in what ratio she would feel relieved and lost. All during the days of his dying, she stood by his bed talking to whichever of her children were present about the food in the cafeteria or the native state of the nursesâ“She's from Portland, isn't that interesting? Your Aunt Nell lived in Portland when Owen was working for the Fisheries.”âand turn occasionally to my father
who was half-conscious, his eyes a morphine cloud, and say, in a sort of baby talk, “It's all right, dear. It's all right.” And after he died, she was dazed, and clearly did not know herself whether she felt relieved or lost, and I felt sorry for her that she had no habit and no means of self-knowing. She was waiting for us to leave so she could start drinking. Only once was she suddenly alert. When the young man from the undertaker's came and explained that she would need a copy of her marriage license in order to do something about the insurance and pensions, she looked briefly alive, anxious, and I realized that, though she rarely told the truth, she was a very poor dissembler. Now her eyes were a young girl's. What, she asked, if someone just couldn't turn up a marriage license; it seemed such a detail, there must be cases. I could see that she was trying out avenues of escape, and I was thinking, now what? They were never married? I told her not to worry. I'd locate it. She considered this and said it would be fine. I could see she had made some decision, and then she grew indefinite again.
So, back in California, it was with some interest that I retraced the drive from San Francisco to Santa Rosa which my parents made in 1939, when according to my mother's storyâit was the first account of it I'd ever heardâshe and my father had eloped. The Sonoma County Office of Records was in a pink cinder-block building landscaped with reptilian pink oleanders which were still blooming in the Indian summer heat. It would have been raining when my parents drove that road in an old (I imagined) cream-colored Packard convertible I had seen one photo of. I asked the woman at the desk for the marriage certificate for February 1939. I wondered what the surprise was going to be, and it was a small one. No problem, Mrs. Minh said. But you had the date wrong, so it took me a while to find it. It was October, not February. Driving back to San Francisco, I had time to review this information. My brother was born in December 1939. Hard to see that it meant anything except that my father had tried very hard to avoid his fate. I felt so sorry for them. That they thought it was worth keeping a secret. Or, more likely, that their life together began in a negotiation too painful to be referred to again. That my mother had, with a certain
fatality, let me pick up the license, so her first son would not know the circumstance of his conception. I felt sorry for her shame, for my father's panic. It finished off my dim wish that there had been an early romantic or ecstatic time in their lives, a blossoming, brief as a northern summer maybe, but a blossoming.
What we've never had is a song
and what we've really had is a song.
Sweet smell of timothy in the meadow.
Clouds massing east above the ridge in a sky
as blue as the mountain lakes,
so there are places on this earth clear all the way up
and all the way down
and in between a various blossoming,
the many seed shapes of the many things
finding their way into flower or not,
that the wind scatters.
There are all kinds of emptiness and fullness
that sing and do not sing.
I said: you are her singing
I came home from school and she was gone. I don't know what instinct sent me to the park. I suppose it was the only place I could think of where someone might hide: she had passed out under an orange tree, curled up. Her face, flushed, eyelids swollen, was a ruin. Though I needed urgently to know whatever was in it, I could hardly bear to look. When I couldn't wake her, I decided to sit with her until she woke up. I must have been ten years old: I suppose I wanted for us to look like a son and mother who had been picnicking, like a mother who had fallen asleep in the warm light and scent of orange blossoms and a boy who was sitting beside her daydreaming, not thinking about anything in particular.
You are not her singing, though she is what's
broken in a song.
She is its silences.
She may be its silences.
Hawk drifting in the blue air,
gray of the granite ridges,
incense cedars, pines.
I tried to think of some place on earth she loved.
I remember she only ever spoke happily
of high school.
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The rain loves the afternoon and the tall lime trees
just where the broad Avenue of Third of May
crosses Jerozolimska Street (it is 1922)
have carved green channels deep into the summer.
Above the dusty pavements, darkening only faintly
when the clouds pass over, above clanging trolleys
and the glistening Vistula flinging the broken forms
of trees and clouds and bridges back into the sky,
above the virgin's statue on the Street of Honey Cakes,
above the Church of the Holy Cross where Chopin's heart,
in a glimmering silver box, is turning to fine dust,
above the kiosks with their posters of Clara Bow and Chaplin
and Valentino as The Sheik, above the crowded tenements
huddled around courtyards, above new apartment houses
with mansard roofs, Viennese grilles, King Tut carvings,
sylphlike women frosted into glass, it is raining a light rain.
It rains on the Saxon Gardens, lilacs and apple trees
on the grassy slopes, and on the Ujazdowski Gardens
with their chain of ponds where the black-billed swans
paddle calmly under the archways of miniature bridges
and a Zionist boy is reading a book on a wooden bench.
It rains on the Botanical Gardens where the magnolias,
blooming, toss off grails of pure white idly.
It rains also on the Lazienki Gardens lightly
and the small palace with its cream-colored walls
and columned porticoes shimmering in the bull's-eye
circles-within-circles the rain makes lightly
on the face of the lagoon and on the feathers of nightingales
furtive in the elms and on the bronze statue of Stanislaus
in the sweet scent of the orangery where water laps
against the mottled marble stairs of the amphitheater
where Paderewski once conducted Brahms, and even the children,
chasing each other on the grass across the way,
or turning in fast circles, arms out, till they fall down
into their dizziness, stopped at a sudden yearning lift
of the violins, and listened. It is summer as I write,
Northern California. Clear air, a blazing sky in August,
bright shy Audubon's warblers in the pines.
I have been reading an old travel guide I found,
bound in dark blue cloth with gilded scrollwork titles,
in a used bookstore in this little mountain town.
It is inscribed, “From Cazimir to Hilda,
with patient hope and deep respect. Come back,
my dear. Be sure to see the bell of Krakow.”
The children clear the table, fetch fleecy towels
for the beach. Congress in recess, guards sleeping
at the embassies. Even the murderers are on vacation.
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Thin snow falling on the runway at Anchorage,
bundled bodies of men, gray padded jackets, outsized gloves,
heads bent against the wind. They lunge, weaving
among the scattering of luggage carts, hard at what must be
half the world's work, loading and unloading.
Mounded snow faintly gray and sculpted into what seems
the entire vocabulary of resignation. It shines
in the one patch of sun, is lustered with the precipitate
of the exhaust of turbine engines, the burnt carbons
of Precambrian forests, life feeding life
feeding life in the usual, mindless way. The colonizer's
usual prefab, low-roofed storage sheds in the distance
pale beige and curiously hopeful in their upright verticals
like boys in an army, or like the spruce and hemlock forest
on low hillsides beyond them. And beyond those, half-seen
in the haze, range after range of snowy mountains
in the valleys of whichâmoose feeding along the frozen streams,
snow foxes hunting ptarmigan in the brilliant whitenessâ
no human could survive for very long, and which it is the imagination's
intensest, least possible longing to inhabit.
This is a day of diplomatic lull. Iraq seems to have agreed
to withdraw from Kuwait with Russian assurances
that the government of Hussein will be protected. It won't happen,
thousands of young men will be killed, shot, blown up,
buried in the sand, an ancient city bombed,
but one speaks this way of countries, as if they were entities
with wills. Iraq has agreed. Russia has promised. A bleak thing,
dry snow melting on the grizzled, salted tarmac.
one of the men on the airstrip is waving his black,
monstrously gloved hands at someone. Almost dancing:
strong body, rhythmic, efficient stride. He knows
what he 's supposed to do. He 's getting our clothes to us
at the next stop. Flower burst ties, silky underwear.
There are three young Indians, thin faces, high cheekbones,
skin the color of old brass, chatting quietly across from me
in what must be an Athabascan dialect. A small child crying
mildly, sleepily, down the way, a mother murmuring in English.
Soft hums of motors stirring through the plane 's low, dim fuselage
the stale air, breathed and breathed, we have been sharing.