The Apple Trees at Olema (25 page)

Sometimes from this hillside just after sunset

The rim of the sky takes on a tinge

of the palest green, like the flesh of a cucumber

When you peel it carefully.

In Crete once, in the summer,

When it was still hot at midnight,

We sat in a taverna by the water

Watching the squid boats rocking in the moonlight,

Drinking retsina and eating salads

of cool, chopped cucumber and yogurt and a little dill.

A hint of salt, something like starch, something

Like an attar of grasses or green leaves

on the tongue is the tongue

And the cucumber

Evolving toward each other.

Since
cumbersome
is a word,

Cumber
must have been a word,

Lost to us now, and even then,

For a person feeling encumbered,

It must have felt orderly and right-minded

To stand at a sink and slice a cucumber.

If you think I am going to make

A sexual joke in this poem, you are mistaken.

In the old torment of the earth

When the fires were cooling and disposing themselves

Into granite and limestone and serpentine and shale,

It is possible to imagine that, under yellowish chemical clouds,

The molten froth, having burned long enough,

Was already dreaming of release,

And that the dream, dimly

But with increasing distinctness, took the form

of water, and that it was then, still more dimly, that it imagined

The dark green skin and opal green flesh of cucumbers.

How much damage do you think we do,

making love this way when we can hardly stand

each other?—I can stand you. You're the rare person

I can always stand.—Well, yes, but you know what I mean.

—-I'm not sure I do. I think I'm more lighthearted

about sex than you are. I think it's a little tiresome

to treat it like a fucking sacrament.—Not much of a pun.

—Not much. (She licks tiny wavelets of dried salt

from the soft flesh of his inner arm. He reaches up

to whisk sand from her breast.)—And I do like you. Mostly.

I don't think you can expect anyone's imagination

to light up over the same person all the time. (Sand,

peppery flecks of it, cling to the rosy, puckered skin

of her aureola in the cooling air. He studies it,

squinting, then sucks her nipple lightly.)—
Umnh
.

—I'm angry. You're not really here. We come

as if we were opening a wound.—Speak for yourself.

(A young woman, wearing the ochre apron of the hotel staff,

emerges from dune grass in the distance. She carries

snow-white towels they watch her stack on a table

under an umbrella made of palm fronds.)—Look,

I know you're hurt. I think you want me

to feel guilty and I don't.—-I don't want you

to feel guilty.—-What do you want then?

—I don't know. Dinner. (The woman is humming something

they hear snatches of, rising and fading on the breeze.)

—That's the girl who lost her child last winter.

—How do you know these things? (She slips

into her suit top.)—I talk to people. I talked

to the girl who cleans our room. (He squints

down the beach again, shakes his head.)

—Poor kid. (She kisses his cheekbone.

He squirms into his trunks.)

My mother was burning in a closet.

Creek water wrinkling over stones.

Sister Damien, in fifth grade, loved teaching mathematics.

Her full white sleeve, when she wrote on the board,

Swayed like the slow movement of a hunting bird,

Egret in the tidal flats,

Swan paddling in a pond.

Let A equal the distance between x and y.

The doves in the desert,

Their cinnamon coverts when they flew.

People made arguments. They had reasons for their appetites.

A child could see it wasn't true.

In the picture of the Last Supper on the classroom wall,

All the apostles had beautiful pastel robes,

Each one the color of a flavor of sherbet.

A line is the distance between two points.

A point is indivisible.

Not a statement of fact; a definition.

It took you a second to understand the difference,

And then you loved it, loved reason,

Moving as a swan moves in a millstream.

I would not have betrayed the Lord

Before the cock crowed thrice,

But I was a child, what could I do

When they came for him?

Ticking heat, the scent of sage,

of pennyroyal. The structure of every living thing

Was praying for rain.

Is, more or less, the title of a poem by John Ashbery and has

No investment in the fact that you can get an adolescent

of the human species to do almost anything (and when adolescence

In the human species ends is what The Fat Man in
The Maltese Falcon

Calls “a nice question, sir, a very nice question indeed”)

Which is why they are tromping down a road in Fallujah

In combat gear and a hundred and fifteen degrees of heat

This morning and why a young woman is strapping

Twenty pounds of explosives to her mortal body in Jerusalem.

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
Have I mentioned

That the other law of human nature is that human beings

Will do anything they see someone else do and someone

Will do almost anything? There is probably a waiter

In this country so clueless he wears a T-shirt in the gym

That says Da Meat Tree. Not our protagonist. American amnesia

Is such that he may very well be the great-grandson

of the elder Karamazov brother who fled to the Middle West

With his girlfriend Grushenka—he never killed his father,

It isn't true that he killed his father—but his religion

Was that woman's honey-colored head, an ideal tangible

Enough to die for, and he lived for it: in Buffalo,

New York, or Sandusky, Ohio. He never learned much English,

But he slept beside her in the night until she was an old woman

Who still knew her way to the Russian pharmacist

In a Chicago suburb where she could buy sachets of the herbs

of the Russian summer that her coarse white nightgown

Smelled of as he fell asleep, though he smoked Turkish cigarettes

And could hardly smell. Grushenka got two boys out of her body,

one was born in 1894, the other in 1896,

The elder having died in the mud at the Battle of the Somme

From a piece of shrapnel manufactured by Alfred Nobel.

Metal traveling at that speed works amazing transformations

on the tissues of the human intestine; the other son worked construction

The year his mother died. If they could have, they would have,

If not filled, half-filled her coffin with the petals

of buckwheat flowers from which Crimean bees made the honey

Bought in the honey market in St. Petersburg (not far

From the place where Raskolnikov, himself an adolescent male,

Couldn't kill the old moneylender without killing her saintly sister,

But killed her nevertheless in a fit of guilt and reasoning

Which went something like this: since the world

Evidently consists in the ravenous pursuit of wealth

And power and in the exploitation and prostitution

of women, except the wholly self-sacrificing ones

Who make you crazy with guilt, and since I am going

To be the world, I might as well take an ax to the head

of this woman who symbolizes both usury and the guilt

The virtue and suffering of women induces in men,

And be done with it). I frankly admit the syntax

of that sentence, like the intestines slithering from the hands

of the startled boys clutching their belly wounds

At the Somme, has escaped my grip. I step over it

Gingerly. Where were we? Not far from the honey market,

Which is not far from the hay market. It is important

To remember that the teeming cities of the nineteenth century

Were site central for horsewhipping. Humans had domesticated

The race of horses some ten centuries before, harnessed them,

Trained them, whipped them mercilessly for recalcitrance

In Vienna, Prague, Naples, London, and Chicago, according

To the novels of the period which may have been noticing this

For the first time or registering an actual statistical increase

In either human brutality or the insurrectionary impulse

In horses, which were fed hay, so there was, of course,

In every European city a hay market like the one in which

Raskolnikov kissed the earth from a longing for salvation.

Grushenka, though Dostoyevsky made her, probably did not

Have much use for novels of ideas. Her younger son,

A master carpenter, eventually took a degree in engineering

From Bucknell University. He married an Irish girl

From Vermont who was descended from the gardener

of Emily Dickinson, but that's another story. Their son

In Iwo Jima died. Gangrene. But he left behind, curled

In the body of the daughter of a Russian Jewish cigar maker

from Minsk, the fetal curl of a being who became the lead dancer

In the Cleveland Ballet, radiant Tanya, who turned in

A bad knee sometime in early 1971, just after her brother ate it

In Cao Dai Dien, for motherhood, which brings us

To our waiter, Dmitri, who, you will have noticed, is not in Baghdad.

He doesn't even want to be an actor. He has been offered

Roles in several major motion pictures and refused them

Because he is, in fact, under contract to John Ashbery

Who is a sane and humane man and has no intention

of releasing him from the poem. You can get killed out there.

He is allowed to go home for his mother's birthday and she

Has described to him on the phone—a cell phone, he 's

Walking down Christopher Street with such easy bearing

He could be St. Christopher bearing innocence across a river—

Having come across a lock, the delicate curl of a honey-

Colored lock of his great-grandmother's Crimean-

Honey-bee-pollen-, Russian-spring-wildflower-sachet-

Scented hair in the attic, where it released for her

In the July heat and raftery midsummer dark the memory

of an odor like life itself carried to her on the wind.

Here is your sea bass with a light lemon and caper sauce.

Here is your dish of raspberries and chocolate; notice

Their subtle transfiguration of the colors of excrement and blood;

And here are the flecks of crystallized lavender that stipple it.