The Apple Trees at Olema (22 page)

If I saw the sleek stroke of moving darkness

Was a hawk, high up, nesting

In the mountain's face, and if,

For once, I didn't want to be the hawk,

Would that help? Token of earnest,

Spent coin of summer, would the wind

Court me then, and would that be of assistance?

The woman who carries the bowl

Bows low in your presence, bows to the ground.

It doesn't matter what she 's really thinking.

Compassion is formal. Suffering is the grass.

She is not first thought, not the urgency.

The man made of fire drinks. The man

Made of cedar drinks.

Two kinds of birds are feasting in the cottonwoods.

She sprinkles millet for the ones that feast on grief.

She strews tears for the thirsty ones

Desire draws south when the leaves begin to turn.

When I was a child my father every morning—

Some mornings, for a time, when I was ten or so,

My father gave my mother a drug called antabuse.

It makes you sick if you drink alcohol.

They were little yellow pills. He ground them

In a glass, dissolved them in water, handed her

The glass and watched her closely while she drank.

It was the late nineteen forties, a time,

A social world, in which the men got up

And went to work, leaving the women with the children.

His wink at me was a nineteen-forties wink.

He watched her closely so she couldn't “pull

A fast one” or “put anything over” on a pair

As shrewd as the two of us. I hear those phrases

In old movies and my mind begins to drift.

The reason he ground the medications fine

Was that the pills could be hidden under the tongue

And spit out later. The reason that this ritual

Occurred so early in the morning—I was told,

And knew it to be true—was that she could

If she wanted, induce herself to vomit,

So she had to be watched until her system had

Absorbed the drug. Hard to render, in these lines,

The rhythm of the act. He ground two of them

To powder in a glass, filled it with water,

Handed it to her, and watched her drink.

In my memory, he 's wearing a suit, gray,

Herringbone, a white shirt she had ironed.

Some mornings, as in the comics we read

When Dagwood went off early to placate

Mr. Dithers, leaving Blondie with crusts

Of toast and yellow rivulets of egg yolk

To be cleared before she went shopping—

On what the comic called a shopping spree—

With Trixie, the next-door neighbor, my father

Would catch an early bus and leave the task

Of vigilance to me. “Keep an eye on Mama, pardner.”

You know the passage in the
Aeneid?
The man

Who leaves the burning city with his father

On his shoulders, holding his young son's hand,

Means to do well among the flaming arras

And the falling columns while the blind prophet,

Arms upraised, howls from the inner chamber,

“Great Troy is fallen. Great Troy is no more.”

Slumped in a bathrobe, penitent and biddable,

My mother at the kitchen table gagged and drank,

Drank and gagged. We get our first moral idea

About the world—about justice and power,

Gender and the order of things—from somewhere.

My friend's older sister's third husband's daughter—

That's about as long as a line of verse should get—

Karmic debris? A field anthropologist's kinship map?

Just sailed by me on the Berkeley street. A student

of complex mathematical systems, a pretty girl,

Ash-colored hair. I might have changed her diapers.

And that small frown might be her parents' lives.

Desire that hollows us out and hollows us out,

That kills us and kills us and raises us up and

Raises us up. Always laughable from the outside:

The English wit who complained of sex that the posture

Was ridiculous had not been struck down by the god

or goddess to whose marble threshing floor offerings

of grapes or olive boughs and flowers or branches

Laden with new fruit or bundles of heavy-headed wheat

Were brought as to any other mystery or power.

My friend sat on the back steps on a summer night

Sick with her dilemma, smoking long cigarettes

While bats veered in the dark and the scraping sound

of a neighbor cleaning a grill with a wire brush

Ratcheted steadily across the backyard fence.

“He's the nicest man I could imagine,” she had said,

“And I feel like I'm dying.” Probably in her middle thirties

Then. Flea markets on Saturday mornings, family dinners

on Sunday, a family large enough so that there was always

A birthday, a maiden aunt from the old neighborhood

In San Francisco, or a brother-in-law, or some solemn child

Studying a new toy in silence on the couch.

Had not lived where, tearing, or like burnished leaves

In a vortex of wind, the part of you that might observe

The comedy of gasps and moans gives way, does not

Demur. Though she did laugh at herself. An erotic

Attachment one whole winter to the mouth

of a particular television actor—she 'd turn the TV on—

Watch him for a minute with a kind of sick yearning—

Shake her head—turn the TV off—go back to the translation

of van Gogh's letters which was her project that year—

or do some ironing—that always seemed to calm her—

The sweet iron smell of steam and linen. “Honest to God,”

She'd say, an expression the elderly aunts might have used,

“For Pete 's sake,” she 'd say, “Get yourself together.”

Hollow flute, or bell not struck, sending out a shimmering

Not-sound, in waves and waves, to the place where the stunned dead

In the not-beginning are gathered to the arms of the living

In the not-noon: the living who grieve, who rage against

And grieve the always solicited, always unattended dead

In the tiered plazas or lush meadows of their gathered

Absence. A man wants a woman that way. A person a person.

Down on all fours, ravenous and humbled. And later—

“Lovers, you remember the shoeshine boys in Quito

In the city market? Missing teeth, unlaced tennis shoes.

They approach you smiling. Their hands are scrofulous,

They have no rules, and they'll steal anything and so

Would you if you were they.” The old capital has always

Just been sacked, the temple hangings burned, and peasants

In the ruins are roasting the royal swans in a small fire

Coaxed from the sticks of the tax assessor's Empire chair

Up against a broken wall. Lent: the saints' bodies

Dressed in purple sacks to be taken off at Easter.

For Magdalen, of course, the resurrection didn't mean

She'd got him back. It meant she 'd lost him in another way.

It was the voice she loved, the body, not the god

Who, she had been told, ascended to his heaven,

There to disperse tenderness and pity on the earth.

The fog has hovered off the coast for weeks

And given us a march of brilliant days

You wouldn't recognize—who have grumbled

So eloquently about gray days on Grizzly Peak—

Unless they put you in mind of puppet pageants

Your poems remember from Lithuanian market towns

Just after the First World War. Here 's more theater:

A mule-tail doe gave birth to a pair of fawns

A couple of weeks ago just outside your study

In the bed of oxalis by the redwood trees.

Having dropped by that evening, I saw,

Though at first I couldn't tell what I was seeing,

A fawn, wet and shivering, curled almost

In a ball under the thicket of hazel and toyon.

I've read somewhere that does hide the young

As best they can and then go off to browse

And recruit themselves. They can't graze the juices

In the leaves if they stay to protect the newborns.

It's the glitch in engineering through which chance

And terror enter on the world. I looked closer

At the fawn. It was utterly still and trembling,

Eyes closed, possibly asleep. I leaned to smell it:

There was hardly a scent. She had licked all traces

of the rank birth-smell away. Do you remember

This fragment from Anacreon?—the context,

of course, was probably erotic: “…her gently,

Like an unweaned fawn left alone in a forest

By its antlered mother, frail, trembling with fright.”

It's a verse—you will like this detail—found

In the papyrus that wrapped a female mummy

A museum in Cairo was examining in 1956.

I remember the time that a woman in Portland

Asked if you were a reader of Flannery O'Connor.

You winced regretfully, shook your head,

And said, “You know, I don't agree with the novel.”

I think you haven't agreed, in this same sense,

With life, never accepted the cruelty in the frame

of things, brooded on your century, and God the Monster,

And the smell of summer grasses in the world

That can hardly be named or remembered

Past the moment of our wading through them,

And the world's poor salvation in the word. Well,

Dear friend, you resisted. You were not mute.

Mark tells me he has seen the fawns grazing

With their mother in the dusk. Gorging on your roses—

So it seems they made it through the night

And neither dog nor car has got to them just yet.

Gerhard Richter: Abstrakte Bilder

1.

To make layers,

As if they were a steadiness of days:

It snowed; I did errands at a desk;

A white flurry out the window thickening; my tongue

Tasted of the glue on envelopes.

on this day sunlight on red brick, bare trees,

Nothing stirring in the icy air.

on this day a blur of color moving at the gym

Where the heat from bodies

Meets the watery, cold surface of the glass.

Made love, made curry, talked on the phone

To friends, the one whose brother died

Was crying and thinking alternately,

Like someone falling down and getting up

And running and falling and getting up.

2.

The object of this poem is not to annihila

To not annih

The object of this poem is to report a theft,

In progress, of everything

That is not these words

And their disposition on the page.

The object o f this poem is to report a theft,

In progress of everything that exists

That is not these words

And their disposition on the page.

The object of his poe is t repor a theft

In rogres f ever hing at xists

Th is no ese w rds

And their disp sit on o the pag

3.

To score, to scar, to smear, to streak,

To smudge, to blur, to gouge, to scrape.

“Action painting,” i.e.,

The painter gets to behave like time.

4.

The typo wound be “paining.”

(To abrade.)

5.

or to render time and stand outside

The horizontal rush of it, for a moment

To have the sensation of standing outside

The greenish rush of it.

6.

Some vertical gesture then, the way that anger

or desire can rip a life apart,

Some wound of color.

You know that milkmaid in Vermeer? Entirely absorbed

In the act of pouring a small stream of milk—

Shocking in the Mauritshuis Museum in The Hague

To have seen how white it is, and alive, as seeing people

Reading their poetry or singing in a chorus, you think

You see the soul is an animal going about its business,

A squirrel, its coat sheening toward fall, stretching

Its body down a slim branch to gather one ripe haw

From a hawthorne, testing the branch with its weight,

Stilling as it sinks, then gingerly reaching out a paw.

There is nothing less ambivalent than animal attention

And so you honor it, admire it even, that her attention,

Turned away from you, is so alive, and you are melancholy

Nevertheless. It is best, of course, to be the one engaged

And being thought of, to be the pouring of the milk.

In The Hague, in the employee 's cafeteria, I wondered

Who the restorer was. The blondish young woman

In the boxy, expensive Japanese coat picking at a dish

of cottage cheese—cottage cheese and a pastry? The sugar

on the bun, long before she woke up, had suffered

Its transformation in the oven. She seems to be a person

Who has counted up the cost and decided what to settle for.

It's in the way her soft, abstracted mouth

Receives the bits of bread and the placid sugars.

or the older man, thinning brown hair, brown tweed coat,

Brown buckskin shoes like the place where dust and sunset

Meet and disappear. A mouth formed by private ironies,

As if he 'd sat silent in too many meetings with people

He thought more powerful and less intelligent than he.

or the whip-thin guy with black, slicked-back hair

And a scarified zigzag flash of lightning at the temple?

I didn't know if there was a type. I wanted

To interview her, or him. What do you do with your life?

I am an acolyte. I peel time, with absolute care,

From thin strips of paint on three-hundred-year-old canvas.

I make the milk milk that flows from the gray-brown paint

of a pitcher held by a represented woman, young, rose

And tender yellow for the cheek the light is lucky enough

To seem to touch, by a certain window that refracts it.

I am the servant of a gesture so complete, a body

So at peace, it has become a thought, entirely its own,

And, though it stills desire, infinitely to be desired,

Though neither known nor possessed by you

or anyone else. The man in black must be an assistant curator.

He looks like he thinks he is a work of art. Everywhere

In The Hague the low-lying smell of sea salt.

We don't know a thing about the mother of Vermeer.

obviously he displaced her nipple there, took

The whole Madonna tradition and turned it into light and milk

By some meticulous habit of mind the geometries

of composition worked in him. And her: strong Dutch body,

Almost tender light, the plainness of the room,

The rich red rug her skin, reddened a little

From the roughness of a towel perhaps, picks up.

And the upward thrust of what longing stirs in you

Toward what dark and what dazed, grateful afterward.

one of you touches the vein in the other's neck,

Feels the pulse there as a shock, the current of a river

or the drawing down of milk. Who wants Amida's Western Paradise

When there is all this world for tongue to taste,

Fingers to touch, small hairs like spun silkweed

Furling on another's arms and legs and lower back.

And so you talk. Always then the other shock

of the singular, lived life, a mother in a rest home,

Maybe, a difficult person, grievous or vindictive.

The gossip of the other servants. A brother who works

As a hosteler at an inn and has grand plans.

You listen. You learned long ago the trick

of not thinking what you're going to say next

When the other person's speaking. Part of you

Drinks her in like milk. Part of you begins to notice

That she is trying out self-deceptions in the account

of some difficulty, lazily formulated. You watch her

Shake her head in self-correction; you notice

That she has a mind that wants to get things right.

The tremor of her body makes a nuzzling notion

Along your flank and you reach down to feel again

The wetness which is what we have instead of the luminosity

of paint. Afterward, in one of those tracks the mind

Returns to when it's on its feet again, she speaks

of Hans, the butler, how he bullies the girls,

Prays vigorously at hourly intervals on Sunday.

It is Sunday. Now she's getting dressed. You've agreed

To call the cab and take her to her mother

Up in Gronigen. She 's grateful, a little teary,

Makes her first small gesture of possession,

Brushing off your coat. outside you can hear

The hoofbeats of shod horses on the cobbles.

It's the moment when the burden of another person's life

Seems insupportable. We want to be reborn incessantly

But actually doing it begins—have you noticed?

To seem redundant. Here is the life that chose you

And the one you chose. Here is the brush, horsehair,

Hair of the badger, the goat's beard, the sable,

And here is the smell of paint. The volatile, sharp oils

of linseed, rapeseed. Here is the stench of the essence

of pinewood in a can of turpentine. Here is the hand,

Flick of wrist, tendon-ripple of the brushstroke. Here—

Cloud, lake water lifting on a summer morning,

Ash and ash and chalky ash—is the stickiness of paint

Adhering to the woven flax of the canvas, here

Is the faithfulness of paint on paint on paint on paint.

Something stays this way, something comes alive

We cannot have, can have because we cannot have it.