The Apple Trees at Olema (17 page)

Where there was only gray, and brownish gray,

And grayish brown against the white

of fallen snow at twilight in the winter woods,

Now an uncanny flamelike thing, black

and sulphur-yellow, as if it were dreamed by Audubon,

Is turned upside down in a delicate cascade

of new green leaves, feeding on whatever mites

or small white spiders haunt underleafs at stem end.

A magnolia warbler, to give the thing a name.

The other name we give this overmuch of appetite

And beauty unconscious of itself is life.

And that that kept the mind becalmed all winter?—

The more austere and abstract rhythm of the trunks,

vertical music the cold makes visible,

That holds the whole thing up and gives it form,

or strength—call that the law. It's made,

whatever we like to think, more of interests

than of reasons, trees reaching each their own way

for the light, to make the sort of order that there is.

And what of those deer threading through the woods

In a late snowfall and silent as the snow?

Look: they move among the winter trees, so much

the color of the trees, they hardly seem to move.

for Justice William J. Brennan, Jr.

This morning a cat—bright orange—pawing at the one patch of new

grass in the sand- and tanbark-colored leaves.

And last night the sapphire of the raccoon's eyes in the beam of the

flashlight.

He was climbing a tree beside the house, trying to get onto the porch, I

think, for a wad of oatmeal

Simmered in cider from the bottom of the pan we'd left out for the birds.

And earlier a burnished, somewhat dazed woodchuck, his coat

gleaming with spring,

Loping toward his burrow in the roots of a tree among the drying

winter's litter

of old leaves on the floor of the woods, when I went out to get the

New York Times.

And male cardinals whistling back and forth—sireeep, sreeep, sreeep—

Sets of three sweet full notes, weaving into and out of each other like

the triplet rhymes in medieval poetry,

And the higher, purer notes of the tufted titmice among them,

High in the trees where they were catching what they could of the early sun.

And a doe and two yearlings, picking their way along the worrying path

they'd made through the gully, their coats the color of the forest floor,

Stopped just at the roots of the great chestnut where the woodchuck's

burrow was,

Froze, and the doe looked back over her shoulder at me for a long

moment and leaped forward,

Her young following, and bounded with that almost mincing precision

in the landing of each hoof

Up the gully, over it, and out of sight. So that I remembered

Dreaming last night that a deer walked into the house while I was

writing at the kitchen table,

Came in the glass door from the garden, looked at me with a stilled

defiant terror, like a thing with no choices,

And, neck bobbing in that fragile-seeming, almost mechanical mix of

arrest and liquid motion, came to the table

And snatched a slice of apple, and stood, and then quietened, and to my

surprise did not leave again.

And those little captains, the chickadees, swift to the feeder and swift away.

And the squirrels with their smoke-plume tails trailing digging in the

leaves to bury or find buried—

I'm told they don't remember where they put things, that it's an activity

of incessant discovery—

Nuts, tree-fall proteins, whatever they forage from around the house of

our leavings,

And the flame-headed woodpecker at the suet with his black-and-white

ladderback elegant fierceness—

They take sunflower seeds and stash them in the rough ridges of the

tree 's bark

Where the beaks of the smoke-and-steel blue nuthatches can't quite get

at them—

Though the nuthatches sometimes seem to get them as they con the

trees methodically for spider's eggs or some other overwintering

insect's intricately packaged lump of futurity

Got from its body before the cold came on.

And the little bat in the kitchen lightwell—

When I climbed on a chair to remove the sheet of wimpled plastic and

let it loose,

It flew straight into my face and I toppled to the floor, chair under me,

And it flared down the hall and did what seemed a frantic reconnoiter

of the windowed, high-walled living room.

And lit on a brass firelog where it looked like a brown and ash gray

teenaged suede glove with Mephistophelean dreams,

And then, spurt of black sperm, up, out the window, and into the

twilight woods.

All this life going on about my life, or living a life about all this life

going on,

Being a creature, whatever my drama of the moment at the edge of the

raccoon's world—

He froze in my flashlight beam and looked down, no affect, just looked,

The ringtailed curled and flared to make him look bigger and not to be

messed with—

I was thinking he couldn't know how charming his comic-book

robber's mask was to me,

That his experience of his being and mine of his and his of mine were

things entirely apart,

Though there were between us, probably, energies of shrewd and

respectful tact, based on curiosity and fear—

I knew about his talons whatever he knew about me—

And as for my experience of myself, it comes and goes, I'm not sure it's

any one thing, as my experience of these creatures is not,

And I know I am often too far from it or too near, glad to be rid of it

which is why it was such a happiness,

The bright orange of the cat, and the first pool of green grass-leaves

in early April, and the birdsong—that orange and that green not

colors you'd set next to one another in the human scheme.

And the crows' calls, even before you open your eyes, at sunup.

The raccoon stared down from the crotch of a tree.

A dark night, icy in the early spring.

“This naturalist I admire,” I said, “says that every species lives in its

own sensory world.”

The raccoon stared down; he was silent.

“He also said that we may come to know enough about the human

brain to diagnose and correct for the deformations

imposed by evolution on the human senses and arrive at something like

objective truth.”

The raccoon was silent.

“Maybe,” I volunteered, “they can do something about raccoon

deformation.”

He might have been thinking “deformed from what?” but I don't think

so; he was silent.

He might have been trying to discern under the odor of garlic and

rosemary on my fingers,

and under the smell of oatmeal soap under that, the smell of sex from a

sweet hour when we lay down and the snow fell in quick flurries

in the early afternoon; he may have been smelling toward some distant

cousin to the smell that is pistil and stamen

from which flowers the raccoon-universe.

Maybe that, but I don't know. The raccoon was silent.

He might have been studying an enemy,

he might simply have been curious

but I don't know.

So I entered the silence, and was glad to be in it for a while, knowing I

couldn't stay.

It smelled like snow and pine and the winter dark, though it was my

silence, not his, and there was nothing there.

for E. O. Wilson

A man talking to his ex-wife on the phone.

He has loved her voice and listens with attention

to every modulation of its tone. Knowing

it intimately. Not knowing what he wants

from the sound of it, from the tendered civility.

He studies, out of the window, the seed shapes

of the broken pods of ornamental trees.

The kind that grow in everyone's garden, that no one

but horticulturists can name. Four arched chambers

of pale green, tiny vegetal proscenium arches,

a pair of black tapering seeds bedded in each chamber.

A wish geometry, miniature, Indian or Persian,

lovers or gods in their apartments. outside, white,

patient animals, and tangled vines, and rain.

Maybe you need to write a poem about grace.

When everything broken is broken,

and everything dead is dead,

and the hero has looked into the mirror with complete contempt,

and the heroine has studied her face and its defects

remorselessly, and the pain they thought might,

as a token of their earnestness, release them from themselves

has lost its novelty and not released them,

and they have begun to think, kindly and distantly,

watching the others go about their days—

likes and dislikes, reasons, habits, fears—

that self-love is the one weedy stalk

of every human blossoming, and understood,

therefore, why they had been, all their lives,

in such a fury to defend it, and that no one—

except some almost inconceivable saint in his pool

of poverty and silence—can escape this violent, automatic

life 's companion ever, maybe then, ordinary light,

faint music under things, a hovering like grace appears.