The Apple Trees at Olema (24 page)

Civic courage is a more complicated matter.

of itself it shines out undefiled.

It neither lies its way into office, nor mistakes

The interests of Roman oil for Roman honor.

The kind of courage death can't claim

Doesn't go very far in politics.

If you are going to speak truth in public places

You may as well take wing from the earth.

Knowing when not to speak also has its virtue.

I wouldn't sit under the same roof beams

With most of the explainers of wars on television

or set sail on the same sleek ship.

They say the gods have been known

To punish the innocent along with the guilty

And nemesis often finds the ones it means,

With its limping gait, to track down.

3.

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NACHO

You talk very well about Inachus

And how Codrus died for his city,

And the offspring of old Aeacus

And the fighting at sacred Ilium under the walls,

But on the price of Chian wine,

And the question of who's going to warm it,

Under whose roof it will be drunk,

And when my bones will come unfrozen, you are mute.

Boy, let's drink to the new moon's sliver,

And drink to the middle of the night, and drink

To good Murena, with three glasses

or with nine. Nine, says the madman poet

Whom the uneven-numbered Muses love.

Three, says the even-tempered Grace who holds

Her naked sisters by the hands

And disapproves altogether of brawling,

Should do a party handsomely.

But what I want's to rave. Why is the flute

From Phrygia silent? Why are the lyre

And the reed pipe hanging on the wall?

oh, how I hate a pinching hand.

Scatter the roses! Let jealous old Lycus

Listen to our pandemonium,

And also the pretty neighbor he 's not up to.

Rhoda loves your locks, Telephus.

She thinks they glisten like the evening star.

As for me, I'm stuck on Glycera:

With a love that smoulders in me like slow fire.

On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Lamont-Doherty

Earth Observatory

1.

October on the planet at the century's end.

Rain lashing the windshield. Through blurred glass

Gusts of a Pacific storm rocking a huge, shank-needled

Himalayan cedar. Under it a Japanese plum

Throws off a vertical cascade of leaves the color

of skinned copper, if copper could be skinned.

And under it, her gait as elegant and supple

As the young of any of earth's species, a schoolgirl

Negotiates a crosswalk in the wind, her hair flying,

The red satchel on her quite straight back darkening

Splotch by smoky crimson splotch as the rain pelts it.

one of the six billion of her hungry and curious kind.

Inside the backpack, dog-eared, full of illustrations,

A book with a title like
Getting to Know Your Planet
.

The book will tell her that the earth this month

Has yawed a little distance from the sun,

And that the air, cooling, has begun to move,

As sensitive to temperature as skin is

To a lover's touch. It will also tell her that the air—

It's likely to say “the troposphere”—has trapped

Emissions from millions of cars, idling like mine

As she crosses, and is making a greenhouse

of the atmosphere. The book will say that climate

Is complicated, that we may be doing this,

And if we are, it may explain that this

Was something we've done quite accidentally,

Which she can understand, not having meant

That morning to have spilled the milk. She 's

one of those who's only hungry metaphorically.

2.

Poetry should be able to comprehend the earth,

To set aside from time to time its natural idioms

of ardor and revulsion, and say, in a style as sober

As the Latin of Lucretius, who reported to Venus

on the state of things two thousand years ago—

“It's your doing that under the wheeling constellations

of the sky,” he wrote, “all nature teems with life”—

Something of the earth beyond our human dramas.

Topsoil: going fast. Rivers: dammed and fouled.

Cod: about fished out. Haddock: about fished out.

Pacific salmon nosing against dams from Yokohama

To Kamchatka to Seattle and Portland, flailing

Up fish ladders, against turbines, in a rage to breed

Much older than human beings and interdicted

By the clever means that humans have devised

To grow more corn and commandeer more lights.

Most of the ancient groves are gone, sacred to Kuan Yin

And Artemis, sacred to the gods and goddesses

In every picture book the child is apt to read.

3.

Lucretius, we have grown so clever that mechanics

In our art of natural philosophy can take the property

of luminescence from a jellyfish and put it in mice.

In the dark the creatures give off greenish light.

Their bodies must be very strange to them.

An artist in Chicago—think of a great trading city

In Dacia or Thracia—has asked to learn the method

So he can sell people dogs that glow in the dark.

4.

The book will try to give the child the wonder

of how, in our time, we understand life came to be:

Stuff flung off from the sun, the molten core

Still pouring sometimes rivers of black basalt

Across the earth from the old fountains of its origin.

A hundred million years of clouds, sulfurous rain.

The long cooling. There is no silence in the world

Like the silence of rock from before life was.

You come across it in a Mexican desert,

A palo verde tree nearby, moss-green. Some

Insect-eating bird with wing feathers the color

of a morning sky perched on a limb of the tree.

That blue, that green, the completely fierce

Alertness of the bird that can't know the amazement

of its being there, a human mind that somewhat does,

Regarding a black outcrop of rock in the desert

Near a sea, charcoal-black and dense, wave-worn,

and all one thing: there 's no life in it at all.

It must be a gift of evolution that humans

Can't sustain wonder. We 'd never have gotten up

From our knees if we could. But soon enough

We 'd fashioned sexy little earrings from the feathers,

Highlighted our cheekbones by rubbings from the rock,

And made a spear from the sinewy wood of the tree.

5.

If she lived in Michigan or the Ukraine,

She'd find, washed up on the beach in a storm like this

Limestone fossils of Devonian coral. She could study

The faint white markings: she might have to lick the stone

To see them if the wind was drying the pale surface

Even as she held it, to bring back the picture of what life

looked like

Three hundred million years ago: a honeycomb with mouths.

6.

Cells that divided and reproduced. From where? Why?

(In our century it was the fashion in philosophy

Not to ask unanswerable questions. That was left

To priests and poets, an attitude you'd probably

Approve.) Then a bacterium grew green pigment.

This was the essential miracle. It somehow unmated

Carbon dioxide to eat the carbon and turn it

Into sugar and spit out, hiss out the molecules

of oxygen the child on her way to school

Is breathing, and so bred life. Something then

of DNA, the curled musical ladder of sugars, acids.

From there to eyes, ears, wings, hands, tongues.

Armadillos, piano tuners, gnats, sonnets,

Military interrogation, the Coho salmon, the Margaret Truman rose.

7.

The people who live in Tena, on the Napo River,

Say that the black, viscid stuff that pools in the selva

Is the blood of the rainbow boa curled in the earth's core.

The great trees in that forest house ten thousands of kinds

of beetle, reptiles no human eyes has ever seen changing

Color on the hot, green, hardly changing leaves

Whenever a faint breeze stirs them. In the understory

Bromeliads and orchids whose flecked petals and womb-

Or mouthlike flowers are the shapes of desire

In human dreams. And butterflies, larger than her palm

Held up to catch a ball or ward off fear. Along the river

Wide-leaved banyans where flocks of raucous parrots,

Fruit-eaters and seed-eaters, rise in startled flares

of red and yellow and bright green. It will seem to be poetry

Forgetting its promise of sobriety to say the rosy shinings

In the thick brown current are small dolphins rising

To the surface where gouts of the oil that burns inside

The engine of the car I'm driving ooze from the banks.

8.

The book will tell her that the gleaming appliance

That kept her milk cold in the night required

Chlorofluorocarbons—Lucretius, your master

Epictetus was right about atoms in a general way.

It turns out they are electricity having sex

In an infinite variety of permutations, Plato's

Yearning halves of a severed being multiplied

In all the ways that all the shapes on earth

Are multiple, complex; the philosopher

Who said that the world was fire was also right—

Chlorofluorocarbons react with ozone, the gas

That makes air tingle on a sparkling day.

Nor were you wrong to describe them as assemblies,

As if evolution were a town meeting or a plebiscite.

(Your theory of wind, and of gases, was also right

And there are more of them than you supposed.)

ozone, high in the air, makes a kind of filter

Keeping out parts of sunlight damaging to skin.

The device we use to keep our food as cool

As if it sat in snow required this substance,

And it reacts with ozone. Where oxygen breeds it

From ultraviolet light, it burns a hole in the air.

9.

They drained the marshes around Rome. Your people,

You know, were the ones who taught the world to love

vast fields of grain, the power and the order of the green,

then golden rows of it, spooled out almost endlessly.

Your poets, those in the generation after you,

Were the ones who praised the packed seed heads

And the vineyards and the olive groves and called them

“Smiling” fields. In the years since we've gotten

Even better at relentless simplification, but it's taken

Until our time for it to crowd out, savagely, the rest

of life. No use to rail against our curiosity and greed.

They keep us awake. And are, for all their fury

And their urgency, compatible with intelligent restraint.

In the old paintings of the Italian Renaissance,

—In the fresco painters who came after you

(It was the time in which your poems were rediscovered—

There was a period when you, and Venus, were lost;

How could she be lost? You may well ask). Anyway

In those years the painters made of our desire

An allegory and a dance in the figure of three graces.

The first, the woman coming toward you, is the appetite

For life; the one who seems to turn away is chaste restraint,

And the one whom you've just glimpsed, her back to you,

Is beauty. The dance resembles wheeling constellations.

They made of it a figure for something elegant or lovely

Forethought gives our species. one would like to think

It makes a dance, that the black-and-white flash

of a flock of buntings in October wind, headed south

Toward winter habitat, would find that the December fields

Their kind has known and mated in for thirty centuries

or more, were still intact, that they will not go

The way of the long-billed arctic curlews who flew

From Newfoundland to Patagonia in every weather

And are gone now from the kinds on earth. The last of them

Seen by any human alit in a Texas marsh in 1964.

10.

What is to be done with our species? Because

We know we're going to die, to be submitted

To that tingling dance of atoms once again,

It's easy for us to feel that our lives are a dream—

As this is, in a way, a dream: the flailing rain,

The birds, the soaked red backpack of the child,

Her tendrils of wet hair, the windshield wipers,

This voice trying to speak across the centuries

Between us, even the long story of the earth,

Boreal forests, mangrove swamps, Tiberian wheat fields

In the summer heat on hillsides south of Rome—all of it

A dream, and we alive somewhere, somehow outside it,

Watching. People have been arguing for centuries

About whether or not you thought of Venus as a metaphor.

Because of the rational man they take you for.

Also about why your poem ended with a plague,

The bodies heaped in the temples of the gods.

To disappear. First one, then a few, then hundreds,

Just stopping over here, to vanish in the marsh at dusk.

So easy, in imagination, to tell the story backward,

Because the earth needs a dream of restoration—

She dances and the birds just keep arriving,

Thousands of them, immense arctic flocks, her teeming life.