The Apple Trees at Olema (8 page)

When old crones wandered in the woods,

I was the hero on the hill

in clear sunlight.

Death's hounds feared me.

Smell of wild fennel,

high loft of sweet fruit high in the branches

of the flowering plum.

Then I am cast down

into the terror of childhood,

into the mirror and the greasy knives,

the dark

woodpile under the fig trees

in the dark.

It is only

the malice of voices, the old horror

that is nothing, parents

quarreling, somebody

drunk.

I don't know how we survive it.

on this sunny morning

in my life as an adult, I am looking

at one clear pure peach

in a painting by Georgia O'Keeffe.

It is all the fullness that there is

in light. A towhee scratches in the leaves

outside my open door.

He always does.

A moment ago I felt so sick

and so cold

I could hardly move.

August is dust here. Drought

stuns the road,

but juice gathers in the berries.

We pick them in the hot

slow-motion of midmorning.

Charlie is exclaiming:

for him it is twenty years ago

and raspberries and Vermont.

We have stopped talking

about
L'Histoire de la vérité
,

about the subject and object

and the mediation of desire.

our ears are stoppered

in the bee-hum. And Charlie,

laughing wonderfully,

beard stained purple

by the word
juice
,

goes to get a bigger pot.

I.

The child is looking in the mirror.

His head falls to one side, his shoulders slump.

He is practicing sadness.

II.

He didn't think she ought to

and she thought she should.

III.

In the summer

peaches the color of sunrise

In the fall

plums the color of dusk

IV.

Each thing moves its own way

in the wind. Bamboo flickers,

the plum tree waves, and the loquat

is shaken.

V.

The dangers are everywhere. Auxiliary verbs, fishbones, a fine carelessness. No one really likes the odor of geraniums, not the woman who dreams of sunlight and is always late for work nor the man who would be happy in altered circumstances. Words are abstract, but
words are abstract
is a dance, car crash, heart's delight. It's the design dumb hunger has upon the world. Nothing is severed on hot mornings when the deer nibble flower heads in a simmer of bay leaves. Somewhere in the summer dusk is the sound of children setting the table. That is mastery: spoon, knife, folded napkin, fork; glasses all around. The place for the plate is wholly imagined. Mother sits here and Father sits there and this is your place and this is mine. A good story compels you like sexual hunger but the pace is more leisurely. And there are always melons.

VI.

little mother

little dragonfly quickness of summer mornings

this is a prayer

this is the body dressed in its own warmth

at the change of seasons

VII.

There are not always melons

There are always stories

VIII.

Chester found a dozen copies of his first novel in a used bookstore and took them to the counter. The owner said, “You can't have them all,” so Chester kept five. The owner said, “That'll be a hundred and twelve dollars.” Chester said, “What?” and the guy said, “They're first editions, Mac, twenty bucks apiece.” And so Chester said, “Why are you charging me a hundred and twelve dollars?” The guy said, “Three of them are autographed.” Chester said, “Look, I wrote this book.” The guy said, “All right, a hundred. I won't charge you for the autographs.”

IX.

The insides of peaches

are the color of sunrise

The outsides of plums

are the color of dusk

X.

Here are some things to pray to in San Francisco: the bay, the mountain, the goddess of the city; remembering, forgetting, sudden pleasure, loss; sunrise and sunset; salt; the tutelary gods of Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Basque, French, Italian, and Mexican cooking; the solitude of coffeehouses and museums; the virgin, mother, and widow moons; hilliness, vistas; John McLaren; Saint Francis; the Mother of Sorrows; the rhythm of any life still whole through three generations; wine, especially zinfandel because from that Hungarian vine-slip came first a native wine not resinous and sugar-heavy; the sourdough mother, yeast and beginning; all fish and fisherman at the turning of the tide; the turning of the tide; eelgrass, oldest inhabitant; fog; seagulls; Joseph Worcester; plum blossoms; warm days in January…

XI.

She thought it was a good idea.

He had his doubts.

XII.

ripe blackberries

XIII.

She said: reside, reside

and he said, gored heart

She said: sunlight, cypress

he said, idiot children

nibbling arsenic in flaking paint

she said: a small pool of semen

translucent on my belly

he said maybe he said

maybe

XIV.

the sayings of my grandmother
:

they're the kind of people

who let blackberries rot on the vine

XV.

The child approaches the mirror very fast

then stops

and watches himself

gravely.

XVI.

So summer gives over—

white to the color of straw

dove gray to slate blue

burnishings

a little rain

a little light on the water

Dear Dan—

This is a letter of apology, unrhymed. Rhyme belongs to the dazzling couplets of arrival. Survival is the art around here. It rhymes by accident with the rhythm of days which arrive like crows in a field of stubble corn in upstate New York in February. In upstate New York in February thaws hardened the heart against the wish for spring. There was not one thing in the barren meadows not muddy and raw-fleshed. At night I dreamed of small black snakes with orange markings disappearing down their holes, of being lost in the hemlocks and coming to a clearing of wild strawberry, sunlight, abandoned apple trees. At night it was mild noon in a clearing. Nothing arrived. This was a place left to flower in the plain cruelty of light. Mornings the sky was opal. The windows faced east and a furred snow reassumed the pines but arrived only mottled in the fields so that its flesh was my grandmother's in the kitchen of the house on Jackson Street, and she was crying. I was a good boy. She held me so tight when she said that, smelling like sleep rotting if sleep rots, that I always knew how death would come to get me and the soft folds of her quivery white neck were what I saw, so that sometimes on an airplane I look down to snow covering the arroyos on the east side of the Sierra and it's grandmother's flesh and I look away. In the house on Jackson Street, I am the figure against the wall in Bonnard's
The Breakfast Room
. The light is terrible. It is wishes that are fat dogs, already sated, snuffling at the heart in dreams. The table linen is so crisp it puts an end to fantasies of rectitude, clean hands, high art, and the blue beside the white in the striping is the color
of the river Loire when you read about it in old books and dreamed of provincial breakfasts, the sun the color of bread crust and the fruit icy cold and there was no terrified figure dwarflike and correct, disappearing off the edge of Bonnard's
The Breakfast Room.
It was not grandmother weeping in the breakfast room or the first thaw dream of beautiful small snakes slithering down holes. In this life that is not dreams but my life the clouds above the bay are massing toward December and gulls hover in the storm-pearled air and the last of last season's cedar spits and kindles on the fire. Summer dries us out with golden light, so winter is a kind of spring here—wet trees, a reptile odor in the earth, mild greening—and the seasonal myths lie across one another in the quick darkening of days. Kristin and Luke are bent to a puzzle, some allegory of the quattrocento cut in a thousand small uneven pieces which, on the floor, they recompose with rapt, leisurely attention. Kristin asks, searching for a piece round at one end, fluted at the other, “Do you know what a shepherd is?” and Luke, looking for a square edge with a sprig of Italian olive in it, makes a guess. “Somebody who hurts sheep.” My grandmother was not so old. She was my mother's mother; I think, the night before, my father must have told her we were going to move. She held me weeping, probably, because she felt she was about to lose her daughter. We only buried her this year. In the genteel hotel on Leavenworth that looked across a mile of human misery to the bay, she smoked regally, complained about her teeth. Luke watched her wide-eyed, with a mingled look of wonder and religious dread she seemed so old. And once, when he reached up involuntarily to touch her withered cheek, she looked at him awhile and patted his cheek back and winked
and said to me, askance: “old age ain't for sissies.” This has nothing to do with the odd terror in my memory. It only explains it—the way this early winter weather makes life seem more commonplace and—at a certain angle—more intense. It is not poetry, where decay and a created radiance lie hidden inside words the way that memory folds them into living. “o Westmoreland thou art a summer bird that ever in the haunch of winter sings the lifting up of day.” Pasternak translated those lines. I imagine Russian summer, the smell of jasmine drifting toward the porch. I would like to get on a plane, but I would also like to sit on the porch and watch one shrink to the hovering of gulls and glint in the distance, circle east toward snow and disappear. He would have noticed the articles as a native speaker wouldn't: a bird,
the
haunch; and understood a little what persists when, eyes half-closed, lattice-shadow on his face, he murmured the phrase in the dark vowels of his mother tongue.

It's funny, isn't it, Karamazov,

all this grief and pancakes afterwards…

These are the dog days,

unvaried

except by accident,

mist rising from soaked lawns,

gone world, everything

rises and dissolves in air,

whatever it is would

clear the air

dissolves in air and the knot

of day unties

invisibly like a shoelace.

The gray-eyed child

who said to my child: “Let's play

in my yard. It's OK,

my mother's dead.”

Under the loquat tree.

It's almost a song,

the echo of a song:

on the bat's back I fly

merrily toward summer

or at high noon

in the outfield clover

guzzling orange Crush,

time endless, examining

a wooden coin I'd carried

all through summer

without knowing it.

The coin was grandpa's joke,

carved from live oak,

Indian side and buffalo side.

His eyes lustered with a mirth

so deep and rich he never

laughed, as if it were a cosmic

secret that we shared.

I never understood; it married

in my mind with summer. Don't

take any wooden nickels,

kid, and gave me one

under the loquat tree.

The squalor of mind

is formlessness,

informis,

the Romans said of ugliness,

it has no form,

a man's misery, bleached skies,

the war between desire

and dailiness. I thought

this morning of Wallace Stevens

walking equably to work

and of a morning two Julys ago

on Chestnut Ridge, wandering

down the hill when one

rusty elm leaf, earth-

skin peeling, wafted

by me on the wind.

My body groaned toward fall

and preternaturally

a heron lifted from the pond.

I even thought I heard

the ruffle of the wings

three hundred yards below me

rising from the reeds.

Death is the mother of beauty