The Apple Trees at Olema (5 page)

9.

A chill tightens the skin

around my bones. The other California

and its bitter absent ghosts

dance to a stillness in the air:

the Klamath tribe was routed and they disappeared.

Even the dust seemed stunned,

tools on the ground, fishnets.

Fires crackled, smouldering.

No movement but the slow turning

of the smoke, no sounds but jays

shrill in the distance and flying further off.

The flicker of lizards, dragonflies.

And beyond the dry flag-woven lodges

a faint persistent slapping.

Carson found ten wagonloads

of fresh-caught salmon, silver

in the sun. The flat eyes stared.

Gills sucking the thin annulling air.

They flopped and shivered,

ten wagonloads. Kit Carson

burned the village to the ground.

They rode some twenty miles that day

and still they saw the black smoke

smear the sky above the pines.

10.

Here everything seems clear,

firmly etched against the pale

smoky sky: sedge, flag, owl's clover,

rotting wharves. A tanker lugs silver

bomb-shaped napalm tins toward

port at Redwood City. Again,

my eye performs

the lobotomy of description.

Again, almost with yearning,

I see the malice of her ancient eyes.

The mud flats hiss as the tide turns.

They say she died in Redwood City,

cursing “the goddammed Anglo-Yankee yoke.”

11.

The otters are gone from the bay

and I have seen five horses

easy in the grassy marsh

beside three snowy egrets.

Bird cries and the unembittered sun,

wings and the white bodies of the birds,

it is morning. Citizens are rising

to murder in their moral dreams.

It is morning because the sun has risen.

I wake slowly in the early heat,

pick berries from the thorny vines.

They are deep red,

sugar-heavy, fuzzed with dust.

The eucalyptus casts a feathered shadow

on the house, which gradually withdraws.

After breakfast

you will swim and I am going to read

that hard man Thomas Hobbes

on the causes of the English civil wars.

There are no women in his world,

Hobbes, brothers fighting brothers

over goods.

I see you in the later afternoon

your hair dry-yellow, plaited

from the waves, a faint salt sheen

across your belly and along your arms.

The kids bring from the sea

intricate calcium gifts—

black turbans, angular green whelks,

the whorled opalescent unicorn.

We may or may not

feel some irritation at the dinner hour.

The first stars, and after dark

Vega hangs in the lyre,

the Dipper tilts above the hill.

Traveling

in Europe Hobbes was haunted by motion.

Sailing or riding, he was suddenly aware

that all things move.

We will lie down,

finally, in our heaviness

and touch and drift toward morning.

“How like a well-kept garden is your soul.”

John Gray's translation of Verlaine

& Baudelaire's butcher in 1861

shorted him four centimes

on a pound of tripe.

He thought himself a clever man

and, wiping the calves' blood from his beefy hands,

gazed briefly at what Tennyson called

“the sweet blue sky.”

It was a warm day.

What clouds there were

were made of sugar tinged with blood.

They shed, faintly, amid the clatter of carriages

new settings of the songs

Moravian virgins sang on wedding days.

The poet is a monarch of the clouds

& Swinburne on his northern coast

“trod,” he actually wrote, “by no tropic foot,”

composed that lovely elegy

and then found out Baudelaire was still alive

whom he had lodged dreamily

in a “deep division of prodigious breasts.”

Surely the poet is monarch of the clouds.

He hovers, like a lemon-colored kite,

over spring afternoons in the nineteenth century

while Marx in the library gloom

studies the birth rate of the weavers of Tilsit

and that gentle man Bakunin,

home after fingerfucking the countess,

applies his numb hands

to the making of bombs.

Recurrences.

Coppery light hesitates

again in the small-leaved

Japanese plum. Summer

and sunset, the peace

of the writing desk

and the habitual peace

of writing, these things

form an order I only

belong to in the idleness

of attention. Last light

rims the blue mountain

and I almost glimpse

what I was born to,

not so much in the sunlight

or the plum tree

as in the pulse

that forms these lines.

That professor of French,

trying to start his car

among the innocent snowdrifts,

is the author of a famous book

on the self.

The self is probably an illusion

and language the structure of illusions.

The self is beguiled, anyway,

by this engine of thought.

The self shuffles cards

with absurd dexterity.

The deck includes

an infinite number

of one-eyed jacks.

on warm days

he knows he should marry Being,

a nice girl, steady

but relentless.

The self has agreed to lecture

before a psychoanalytic study group.

on the appointed day he

does not appear, thereby

meeting his obligation.

The self grants an audience

to the Pope.

They talk shop.

The snark is writing a novel

called The Hunting of the Self.

The self is composing a monograph

on the frames of antique mirrors.

The self botanizes.

He dreams of breeding, one day,

an odorless narcissus.

There is a girl the self loves.

She has been trying to study him for days

but her mind keeps

wandering.

Quick in the April hedge

were juncos and kinglets.

I was at the window

just now, the bacon

sizzled under hand,

the coffee steamed

fragrantly & fountains

of the
Water Music

issued from another room.

Living in a house

we live in the body

of our lives, last night

the odd after-dinner light

of early spring & now

the sunlight warming or

shadowing the morning rooms.

I am conscious of being

myself the inhabitant

of certain premises:

coffee & bacon & Handel

& upstairs asleep my wife.

very suddenly

old dusks break over me,

the thick shagged heads

of fig trees near the fence

& not wanting to go in

& swallows looping

on the darkened hill

& all that terror

in the house

& barely, only barely,

a softball

falling toward me

like a moon.

1.

What I wanted

in the pearly repetitions of February

was vision. All winter,

grieved and dull,

I hungered for it.

Sundays I looked for lightningstricken

trees

in the slow burning of the afternoon

to cut them down, split

the dry centers,

and kindle from their death

an evening's warmth

in the uxorious amber repetitions

of the house. Dusks

weighted me, the fire,

the dim trees. I saw

the bare structure

of their hunger for light

reach to where darkness

joined them. The dark

and the limbs tangled

luxuriant as hair.

I could feel night gather them

but removed my eyes from the tug of it

and watched the fire,

a smaller thing,

contained by the hewn stone

of the dark hearth.

2.

I can't decide

about my garbage and the creatures

who come at night to root

and scatter it. I could lock it

in the shed, but I imagine

wet noses, bodies grown alert

to the smells of warm decay

in the cold air. It seems a small thing

to share what I don't want,

but winter mornings the white yard

blossoms grapefruit peels,

tin cans, plastic bags,

the russet cores of apples.

The refuse of my life

surrounds me and the sense of waste

in the dreary gathering of it

compels me all the more

to labor for the creatures

who quiver and are quick-eyed

and bang the cans at night

and are not grateful. The other morning,

walking early in the new sun,

I was rewarded. A thaw turned up

the lobster shells from Christmas Eve.

They rotted in the yard

and standing in the muddy field I caught,

as if across great distances,

a faint rank fragrance of the sea.

3.

There are times

I wish my ignorance were

more complete. I remember

clamming inland beaches

on the January tides

along Tomales Bay. A raw world

where green crabs

which have been exposed

graze nervously on intertidal kelp

and sea anemones are clenched and colorless

in eddying pools

near dumb clinging starfish

on the sides and undersides of rock.

Among the cockles and the horseneck clams,

I turned up long, inch-thick

sea worms. Female,

phallic, ruddy brown, each one

takes twenty years to grow.

Beach people call them
innkeepers

because the tiny male lives inside

and feeds on plankton

in the water that the worm

churns through herself to move.

I watched the brown things

that brightness bruised

writhing in the sun. Then,

carefully, I buried them.

And, eyes drifting, heartsick,

honed to the wind's edge,

my mind became the male

drowsing in that inland sea

who lives in darkness,

drops seed twice in twenty years,

and dies. I look from my window

to the white fields

and think about the taste of clams.

4.

A friend, the other night,

read poems full of rage

against the poor uses of desire

in mere enactment. A cruel music

lingered in my mind.

The poems made me think

I understood

why men cut women up. Hating

the source, nerved

irreducible, that music hacked

the body till the source was gone.

Then the heavy cock wields,

rises, spits seed

at random and the man

shrieks, homeless

and perfected in the empty dark.

His god is a thrust of infinite desire

beyond the tame musk

of companionable holes.

It descends to women occasionally

with contempt and languid tenderness.

I tried to hate my wife 's cunt,

the sweet place where I rooted,

to imagine the satisfied disgust

of cutting her apart,

bloody and exultant

in the bad lighting and scratchy track

of butcher shops

in short experimental films.

It was easier that I might have supposed.

o spider cunt, o raw devourer.

I wondered what to make

of myself. There had been a thaw.

I looked for green shoots

in the garden, wild flowers in the woods.

I found none.

5.

In March the owls

began to mate. Moon

on windy snow. Mournful,

liquid, the dark hummed

their cries, a soft

confusion. Hard frost

feathered the windows.

I could not sleep.

I imagined the panic

of the meadow mouse,

the star-nosed mole.

Slowly at first, I

made a solemn face

and tried the almost human wail

of owls, ecstatic

in the winter trees,
twoo, twoo
.

I drew long breaths.

My wife stirred in our bed.

Joy seized me.