The Apple Trees at Olema (6 page)

6.

Days return

day to me, the brittle light.

My alertness has no

issue. Deep in the woods

starburst needles of the white pine

are roof to the vacancies

in standing still. Wind

from the lake stings me.

Hemlocks grow cerebral

and firm in the dim attenuation

of the afternoon. The longer

dusks are a silence

born in pale redundancies

of silence. Walking home

I follow the pawprints of the fox.

I know that I know myself

no more than a seed

curled in the dark of a winged pod

knows flourishing.

We asked the captain what course

of action he proposed to take toward

a beast so large, terrifying, and

unpredictable. He hesitated to

answer, and then said judiciously:

“I think I shall praise it.”

When the swordsman fell in Kurosawa's
Seven Samurai

in the gray rain,

in Cinemascope and the Tokugawa dynasty,

he fell straight as a pine, he fell

as Ajax fell in Homer

in chanted dactyls and the tree was so huge

the woodsman returned for two days

to that lucky place before he was done with the sawing

and on the third day he brought his uncle.

They stacked logs in the resinous air,

hacking the small limbs off,

tying those bundles separately.

The slabs near the root

were quartered and still they were awkwardly large;

the logs from the midtree they halved:

ten bundles and four great piles of fragrant wood,

moons and quarter moons and half-moons

ridged by the saw's tooth.

The woodsman and the old man his uncle

are standing in midforest

on a floor of pine silt and spring mud.

They have stopped working

because they are tired and because

I have imagined no pack animal

or primitive wagon. They are too canny

to call in neighbors and come home

with a few logs after three days' work.

They are waiting for me to do something

or for the overseer of the Great Lord

to come and arrest them.

How patient they are!

The old man smokes a pipe and spits.

The young man is thinking he would be rich

if he were already rich and had a mule.

Ten days of hauling

and on the seventh day they'll probably

be caught, go home empty-handed

or worse. I don't know

whether they're Japanese or Mycenaean

and there 's nothing I can do.

The path from here to that village

is not translated. A hero, dying,

gives off stillness to the air.

A man and a woman walk from the movies

to the house in the silence of separate fidelities.

There are limits to imagination.

All the new thinking is about loss.

In this it resembles all the old thinking.

The idea, for example, that each particular erases

the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-

faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk

of that black birch is, by his presence,

some tragic falling off from a first world

of undivided light. or the other notion that,

because there is in this world no one thing

to which the bramble of
blackberry
corresponds,

a word is elegy to what it signifies.

We talked about it late last night and in the voice

of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone

almost querulous. After a while I understood that,

talking this way, everything dissolves:
justice
,

pine, hair, woman, you
and
I
. There was a woman

I made love to and I remembered how, holding

her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,

I felt a violent wonder at her presence

like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river

with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,

muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish

called
pumpkinseed
. It hardly had to with her.

Longing, we say, because desire is full

of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.

But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,

the thing her father said that hurt her, what

she dreamed. The are moments when the body is as numinous

as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.

Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,

saying
blackberry, blackberry, blackberry
.

Ah, love, this is fear. This is fear and syllables

and the beginnings of beauty. We have walked the city,

a flayed animal signifying death, a hybrid god

who sings in the desolation of filth and money

a song the heart is heavy to receive. We mourn

otherwise. otherwise the ranked monochromes,

the death-teeth of that horizon, survive us

as we survive pleasure. What a small hope.

What a fierce small privacy of consolation.

What a dazzle of petals for the poor meat.

Blind, with eyes like stars, like astral flowers,

from the purblind mating sickness of the beasts

we rise, trout-shaken, in the gaping air,

in terror, the scarlet sun-flash

leaping from the pond's imagination

of a deadly sea. Fish, mole,

we are the small stunned creatures

inside these human resurrections, the nights

the city praises and defiles. From there we all

walk slowly to the sea gathering scales

from the cowled whisper of the waves,

the mensural polyphony. Small stars,

and blind the hunger under sun,

we turn to each other and turn to each other

in the mother air of what we want.

That is why blind Orpheus praises love

and why love gouges out our eyes

and why all lovers smell their way to Dover.

That is why innocence has so much to account for,

why Venus appears least saintly in the attitudes of shame.

This is lost children and the deep sweetness of the pulp,

a blue thrumming at the formed bone, river,

flame, quicksilver. It is not the fire

we hunger for and not the ash. It is the still hour,

a deer come slowly to the creek at dusk,

the table set for abstinence, windows

full of flowers like summer in the provinces

vanishing when the moon's half-face pallor

rises on the dark flax line of hills.

The woman I love is greedy,

but she refuses greed.

She walks so straightly.

When I ask her what she wants,

she says, “A yellow bicycle.”

Sun, sunflower,

coltsfoot on the roadside,

a goldfinch, the sign

that says Yield, her hair,

cat's eyes, his hunger

and a yellow bicycle.

Once, when they had made love in the middle of the night and it was very sweet, they decided they were hungry, so they got up, got dressed, and drove downtown to an all-night donut shop. Chicano kids lounged outside, a few drunks, and one black man selling dope. Just at the entrance there was an old woman in a thin floral print dress. She was barefoot. Her face was covered with sores and dry peeling skin. The sores looked like raisins and her skin was the dry yellow of a parchment lampshade ravaged by light and tossed away. They thought she must have been hungry and, coming out again with a white paper bag full of hot rolls, they stopped to offer her one. She looked at them out of her small eyes, bewildered, and shook her head for a little while, and said very kindly, “No.”

Her song to the yellow bicycle:

The boats on the bay

have nothing on you,

my swan, my sleek one!

1.

In the life we lead together every paradise is lost.

Nothing could be easier: summer gathers new leaves

to casual darkness. So few things we need to know.

And the old wisdoms shudder in us and grow slack.

Like renunciation. Like the melancholy beauty

of giving it all up. Like walking steadfast

in the rhythms, winter light and summer dark.

And the time for cutting furrows and the dance.

Mad seed. Death waits it out. It waits us out,

the sleek incandescent saints, earthly and prayerful.

In our modesty. In our shamefast and steady attention

to the ceremony, its preparation, the formal hovering

of pleasure which falls like the rain we pray not to get

and are glad for and drown in. or spray of that sea,

irised: otters in the tide lash, in the kelp-drench,

mammal warmth and the inhuman element. Ah, that is the secret.

That she is an otter, that Botticelli saw her so.

That we are not otters and are not in the painting

by Botticelli. We are not even in the painting by Bosch

where the people are standing around looking at the frame

of the Botticelli painting and when Love arrives, they throw up.

or the Goya painting of the sad ones, angular and shriven,

who watch the Bosch and feel very compassionate

but hurt each other often and inefficiently. We are not in any painting.

If we do it at all, we will be like the old Russians.

We'll walk down through scrub oak to the sea

and where the seals lie preening on the beach

we will look at each other steadily

and butcher them and skin them.

2.

The myth they chose was the constant lovers.

The theme was richness over time.

It is a difficult story and the wise never choose it

because it requires a long performance

and because there is nothing, by definition, between the acts.

It is different in kind from a man and the pale woman

he fucks in the ass underneath the stars

because it is summer and they are full of longing

and sick of birth. They burn coolly

like phosphorus, and the thing need be done

only once. Like the sacking of Troy

it survives in imagination,

in the longing brought perfectly to closing,

the woman's white hands opening, opening,

and the man churning inside her, thrashing there.

And light travels as if all the stars they were under

exploded centuries ago and they are resting now, glowing.

The woman thinks what she is feeling is like the dark

and utterly complete. The man is past sadness,

though his eyes are wet. He is learning about gratitude,

how final it is, as if the grace in Botticelli's
Primavera
,

the one with sad eyes who represents pleasure,

had a canvas to herself, entirely to herself.

I am outside a door and inside

the words do not fumble

as I fumble saying this.

It is the same in the dream

where I touch you. Notice

in this poem the thinning out

of particulars. The gate

with the three snakes is burning,

symbolically, which doesn't mean

the flames can't hurt you.

Now it is the pubic arch instead

and smells of oils and driftwood,

of our bodies working very hard

at pleasure but they are not

thinking about us. Bless them,

it is not a small thing to be

happily occupied, go by them

on tiptoe. Now the gate is marble

and the snakes are graces.

You are the figure in the center.

on the left you are going away

from yourself. on the right

you are coming back. Meanwhile

we are passing through the gate

with everything we love. We go

as fire, as flesh, as marble.

Sometimes it is good and sometimes

it is dangerous like the ignorance

of particulars, but our words are clear

and our movements give off light.

Because it is neither easy nor difficult,

because the other dark is not passport

nor is the inner dark, the horror

held in memory as talisman. Not to go in

stupidly holding out dark as some

wrong promise of fidelity, but to go in

as one can, empty or worshipping.

White, as a proposition. Not leprous

by easy association nor painfully radiant.

or maybe that, yes, maybe painfully.

To go into that. As: I am walking in the city

and there is the whiteness of the houses,

little cubes of it bleaching in the sunlight,

luminous with attritions of light, the failure

of matter in the steadiness of light,

a purification, not burning away,

nothing so violent, something clearer

that stings and stings and is then

past pain or this slow levitation of joy.

And to emerge, where the juniper

is simply juniper and there is the smell

of new shingle, a power saw outside

and inside a woman in the bath,

a scent of lemon and a drift of song,

a heartfelt imitation of Bessie Smith.

The given, as in given up

or given out, as in testimony.

The child brought blue clay from the creek

and the woman made two figures: a lady and a deer.

At that season deer came down from the mountain

and fed quietly in the redwood canyons.

The woman and the child regarded the figure of the lady,

the crude roundness, the grace, the coloring like shadow.

They were not sure where she came from,

except the child's fetching and the woman's hands

and the lead-blue clay of the creek

where the deer sometimes showed themselves at sundown.