The Apple Trees at Olema (23 page)

1.

A house of old, soft, gray, salt-lustered wood,

Windows onto dune grass and a beach.

His wife is upstairs working in her study

When the doorbell rings. The young man at the door,

A Jehovah's Witness, has an Adam's apple

So protuberant it's conducting a flirtation

With deformity. The man, trying not to stare,

Has a saddened panicked premonition

That his wife needs help, and then a stronger feeling

That he has no wife, has never had a wife.

The young man, eyes contracted by concentration,

Is talking about what he calls “the first awakening.”

2.

When the lights went out, she drove to town

And bought a lot of candles. The whole village

Was in the general store buying flashlights,

Batteries, oil lamps, oil lamp mantles, fuel,

Telling the story of where they were

When everything went dark, lingering

Awhile in this sudden village in the village.

When she got home, the power was restored.

That's how the radio described it: “power restored.”

3.

She woke him to say that everything was loud,

The night bird's song, the white of the daisies

In the garden in the dark. Then she woke him

To describe headlights on the road across the bay:

They seemed as lonely as the earth. He said

At that hour it must have been a fisherman,

Who was probably baiting line for sand sharks

As they spoke. He fell asleep imagining

The man setting the line, pouring coffee,

Blowing on his hands, shivering against the cold.

She was awake beside him, her panic like the wind.

4.

It was hot. She was stripping a kitchen chair

She'd bought at a garage sale up the bay.

She was working indoors because the sun

outside would dry the paint remover

As fast as she applied it. So she worked

In the kitchen, opening the windows

And hoping for a little breeze. Which came and went.

There were three layers of paint on the chair,

She discovered, white, an evergreen shade of green,

Then red, and underneath the paint what looked like cedar.

She scraped hard and watched her mind

Shying from the notion of endeavor.

A paradise of palm and palm and palm

And glittering sea.

Rocks, pelicans, then pure horizon,

Angular white villas on a hillside

Tumbling to the sea.

“Gracias.” “De nada.”

A flycatcher in an ironwood,

Sulfur belly, whitish throat,

A thin rind of brown-gold on ash-gray wings.

Utterly alert. He has his work to do.

After breakfast they went their separate ways.

Gulls and lulls and glittering sea.

“The papaya was lovely this morning.”

“Yes, but the guava was not quite ripe.”

Expressionist crucifix: the frigate bird.

Sand-colored day, bright heat.

“What do you call a lot of pelicans?”

“A flotilla.” “Ah, a little float.”

“A baby fleet.” Smell of vanilla

In the desert, and, oddly, maple

(yerba santa?). Making love after,

To the sound of waves,

The sound of waves.

Eden, limbo.

Fan palms and the sea; festoons

of big-leaved fan palms

Fanning out; the sea on which they pitch

Raking sand and raking sand, sighing

And pitching and raking sand.

Harlequin sparrows in a coral tree.

one halcyon harrying another in the desert sky,

Blue, and would be turquoise,

Would be stone.

Bone china handle of a coffee mug: the moon.

What's old? The silence

In this black, humped porous mass

of “prefossiliferous rock”

The ocean beats against.

No animals, no plants,

The tides of fire before there was a sea.

Before skin, words.

“Sonorous nutshells rattling vacantly.”

Brilliant welter, azure welter,

occurs—the world occurs—

only in the present tense.

“I'll see you after lunch.”

(Kisses him lightly)

“—As if raspberry tanagers in palms,

High up in orange air, were barbarous.”

In winter, in a small room, a man and a woman

Have been making love for hours. Exhausted,

very busy wringing out each other's bodies,

They look at one another suddenly and laugh.

“What is this?” he says. “I can't get enough of you,”

She says, a woman who thinks of herself as not given

To cliché. She runs her fingers across his chest,

Tentative touches, as if she were testing her wonder.

He says, “Me too.” And she, beginning to be herself

Again, “You mean you can't get enough of you either?”

“I mean,” he takes her arms in his hands and shakes them,

“Where does this come from?” She cocks her head

And looks into his face. “Do you really want to know?”

“Yes,” he says. “Self-hatred,” she says, “longing for God.”

Kisses him again. “It's not what it is,” a wry shrug,

“it's where it comes from.” Kisses his bruised mouth

A second time, a third. Years later, in another city,

They're having dinner in a quiet restaurant near a park.

Fall. Earlier that day, hard rain: leaves, brass-colored

And smoky crimson, flying everywhere. Twenty years older,

She is very beautiful. An astringent person. She 'd become,

She said, an obsessive gardener, her daughters grown.

He's trying not to be overwhelmed by love or pity

Because he sees she has no hands. He thinks

She must have given them away. He imagines,

very clearly, how she wakes some mornings

(He has a vivid memory of her younger self, stirred

From sleep, flushed, just opening her eyes)

To momentary horror because she can't remember

What she did with them, why they were gone,

And then remembers, and calms herself, so that the day

Takes on its customary sequence once again.

She asks him if he thinks about her. “occasionally,”

He says, smiling. “And you?” “Not much,” she says,

“I think it's because we never existed inside time.”

He studies her long fingers, a pianist's hands,

or a gardener's, strong, much-used, as she fiddles

With her wineglass and he understands, vaguely,

That it must be his hands that are gone. Then

He's describing a meeting that he 'd sat in all day,

Chaired by someone they'd felt, many years before,

Mutually superior to. “You know the expression

‘A perfect fool,'” she 'd said, and he had liked her tone

of voice so much. She begins a story of the company

In Maine she orders bulbs from, begun by a Polish refugee

Married to a French-Canadian separatist from Quebec.

It's a story with many surprising turns and a rare

Chocolate-black lily at the end. He 's listening,

Studying her face, still turning over her remark.

He decides that she thinks more symbolically

Than he does and that it seemed to have saved her,

For all her fatalism, from certain kinds of pain.

She finds herself thinking what a literal man he is,

Notices, as if she were recalling it, his pleasure

In the menu, and the cooking, and the architecture of the room.

It moves her—in the way that earnest limitation

Can be moving, and she is moved by her attraction to him.

Also by what he was to her. She sees her own avidity

To live then, or not to not have lived might be more accurate,

From a distance, the way a driver might see from the road

A startled deer running across an open field in the rain.

Wild thing. Here and gone. Death made it poignant, or,

If not death exactly, which she 'd come to think of

As creatures seething in a compost heap, then time.

The creek's silver in the sun of almost August,

And bright dry air, and last runnels of snowmelt,

Percolating through the roots of mountain grasses,

vinegar weed, golden smoke, or meadow rust,

Do they confer, do the lovers' bodies

In the summer dusk, his breath, her sleeping face

Confer—, does the slow breeze in the pines?

If you were the interpreter, if that were your task.

O!

1.

O happiness! To see an iris.

The color of indigo, as Ella's dress was once, and the delicate scent was

like that of her skin.

O what a mumbling to describe an iris that was blooming when Ella did

not exist, nor all our kingdoms, nor all our desmesnes!

2.

GUSTAV KLIMT (1862–1918)

Judith
(detail)

OESTERREICHISCHE GALERIE

3.

SALVATOR ROSA (1615–1673)

A Landscape with Figures

YALE UNIVERSITY MUSEUM

4.

EDWARD HOPPER (1882–1967)

Hotel Room

THYSSEN COLLECTION, MADRID

O what sadness unaware that it's sadness!

What despair that doesn't know it's despair!

1.

O
DES
, 1.38
P
ERSICOS ODI, PUER, APPARATUS

I hate Persian filigree, and garlands

Woven out of lime tree bark.

on no account are you to hunt up, for my sake,

The late-blooming rose.

Plain myrtle will do nicely for a crown.

It's not unbecoming on you as you pour

or on me as I sip, in the arbor's shade,

A glass of cool wine.

Here, by the way, is your manumission.

Let it be noted that after two thousand years

The poet Horace, he of the suave Greek meters, has

At last freed his slaves.

2.

O
DES
, 3.2
A
NGUSTAM AMICE PAUPERIEM PATI

Let the young, toughened by a soldiers' training,

Learn to bear hardship gladly

And to terrify Parthian insurgents

From the turrets of their formidable tanks,

Also to walk so easily under desert skies

That the mother of some young Sunni

Will see a marine in the dusty streets

And turn to the daughter-in-law beside her

And say with a shudder: Pray God our boy

Doesn't stir up that Roman animal

Whom a cruel rage for blood would drive

Straight to the middle of any slaughter.

It is sweet, and fit, to die for one 's country,

Especially since death doesn't spare deserters

or the young man without a warrior's instincts

Who goes down with a bullet in his back.