The Apple Trees at Olema (9 page)

and that clean-shaven man

smelling of lotion,

lint-free, walking

toward his work, a

pure exclusive music

in his mind.

The mother of the neighbor

child was thirty-one,

died, at Sunday breakfast,

of a swelling in the throat.

on a toy loom

she taught my daughter

how to weave. My daughter

was her friend

and now she cannot sleep

for nighttime sirens,

sure that every wail

is someone dead.

Should I whisper in her ear,

death is the mother

of beauty? Wooden

nickels, kid? It's all in

shapeliness, give your

fears a shape?

In fact, we hide together

in her books.

Prairie farms, the heron

knows the way, old

country songs, herbal magic,

recipes for soup,

tales of spindly orphan

girls who find

the golden key, the

darkness at the center

of the leafy wood.

And when she finally sleeps

I try out Chekhov's

tenderness to see

what it can save.

Maryushka the beekeeper's

widow,

though three years mad,

writes daily letters

to her son. Semyon transcribes

them. The pages

are smudged by his hands,

stained with

the dregs of tea:

“My dearest Vanushka,

Sofia Agrippina's ill

again. The master

asks for you. Wood

is dear. The cold

is early. Poor

Sofia Agrippina!

The foreign doctor

gave her salts

but Semyon says her icon

candle guttered

St. John's Eve. I am afraid,

Vanya. When she 's ill,

the master likes to have

your sister flogged.

She means no harm.

The rye is gray

this time of year.

When it is bad, Vanya,

I go into the night

and the night eats me.”

The haiku comes

in threes

with the virtues of brevity:

What a strange thing!

To be alive

beneath plum blossoms.

The black-headed

Steller's jay is squawking

in our plum.

Thief! Thief!

A hard, indifferent bird,

he'd snatch your life.

The love of books

is for children

who glimpse in them

a life to come, but

I have come

to that life and

feel uneasy

with the love of books.

This is my life,

time islanded

in poems of dwindled time.

There is no other world.

But I have seen it twice.

In the Palo Alto marsh

sea birds rose in early light

and took me with them.

Another time, dreaming,

river birds lifted me,

swans, small angelic terns,

and an old woman in a shawl

dying by a dying lake

whose life raised men

from the dead

in another country.

Thick nights, and nothing

lets us rest. In the heat

of mid-July our lust

is nothing. We swell

and thicken. Slippery,

purgatorial, our sexes

will not give us up.

Exhausted after hours

and not undone,

we crave cold marrow

from the tiny bones that

moonlight scatters

on our skin. Always

morning arrives,

the stunned days,

faceless, droning

in the juice of rotten quince,

the flies, the heat.

Tears, silence.

The edified generations

eat me, Maryushka.

I tell them

pain is form and

almost persuade

myself. They are not

listening. Why

should they? Who

cannot save me anymore

than I, weeping

over
Great Russian Short

Stories
in summer,

under the fattened figs,

saved you. Besides,

it is winter there.

They are trying out

a new recipe for onion soup.

Use a heavy-bottomed

three- or four-quart pan.

Thinly slice six large

yellow onions and sauté

in olive oil and butter

until limp. Pour in

beef broth. Simmer

thirty minutes,

add red port and bake

for half an hour. Then

sprinkle half a cup

of diced Gruyère and cover

with an even layer

of toasted bread and

shredded Samsoe. Dribble

melted butter on the top

and bake until the cheese

has bubbled gold.

Surround yourself with friends.

Huddle in a warm place.

Ladle. Eat.

Weave and cry.

Child, every other siren

is a death;

the rest are for speeding.

Look how comically the jay's

black head emerges

from a swath of copper leaves.

Half the terror

is the fact that,

in our time, speed saves us,

a whine we've traded

for the hopeless patience

of the village bell

which tolled in threes:

weave and cry and weave.

Wilhelm Steller, form's

hero, made

a healing broth.

He sailed with Bering

and the crew despised him,

a mean impatient man

born low enough

to hate the lower class.

For two years

he'd connived to join

the expedition and put

his name to all the beasts

and flowers of the north.

Now, Bering sick,

the crew half-mad with scurvy,

no one would let him

go ashore. Panic,

the maps were useless,

the summer weather almost gone.

He said, there are herbs

that can cure you,

I can save you all. He didn't

give a damn about them

and they knew it. For two years

he'd prepared. Bering listened.

Asleep in his bunk, he 'd

seen death writing in the log.

on the island while

the sailors searched for water

Steller gathered herbs

and looking up

he saw the blue, black-crested

bird, shrilling in a pine.

His mind flipped to

Berlin, the library, a glimpse

he'd had at Audubon,

a blue-gray crested bird

exactly like the one

that squawked at him, a

Carolina jay, unlike

any European bird; he knew

then where they were,

America, we're saved.

No one believed him or,

sick for home, they didn't care

what wilderness

it was. They set sail

west. Bering died.

Steller's jay
, by which

I found Alaska.

He wrote it in his book.

Saved no one. Still

walking in the redwoods

I hear the cry

thief, thief
, and

think of Wilhelm Steller;

in my dream we

are all saved. Camping

on a clement shore

in early fall, a strange land.

We feast most delicately.

The swans are stuffed with grapes,

the turkey with walnut

and chestnut and wild plum.

The river is our music: unalaska

(to make bread from acorns

we leach the tannic acid out—

this music, child,

and more, much more!).

When I was just

your age, the war was over

and we moved.

An Okie family lived

next door to our new

country house. That summer

Quincy Phipps was saved.

The next his house became

an unofficial Pentecostal church.

Summer nights: hidden

in the garden I ate figs,

watched where the knobby limbs

rose up and flicked

against the windows where

they were.
O Je-sus
.

Kissed and put to bed,

I slipped from the window

to the eaves and nestled

by the loquat tree.

The fruit was yellow-brown

in daylight; under the moon

pale clusters hung

like other moons, O

Je-sus
, and I picked them;

the fat juices

dribbling down my chin,

I sucked and listened.

Men groaned. The women

sobbed and moaned, a

long unsteady belly-deep

bewildering sound, half

pleasure and half pain

that ended sometimes

in a croon, a broken song:

O Je-sus
,

Je-sus
.

That is what I have

to give you, child, stories,

songs, loquat seeds,

curiously shaped; they

are the frailest stay against

our fears. Death

in the sweetness, in the bitter

and the sour, death

in the salt, your tears,

this summer ripe and overripe.

It is a taste in the mouth,

child. We are the song

death takes its own time

singing. It calls us

as I call you
child

to calm myself. It is every

thing touched casually,

lovers, the images

of saviors, books, the coin

I carried in my pocket

till it shone, it is

all things lustered

by the steady thoughtlessness

of human use.

A man thinks
lilacs against white houses
, having seen them in the farm country south of Tacoma in April, and can't find his way to a sentence, a brushstroke carrying the energy of
brush
and
stroke

—as if he were stranded on the aureole of the memory of a woman's breast,

and she, after the drive from the airport and a chat with her mother and a shower, which is ritual cleansing and a passage through water to mark transition,

had walked up the mountain on a summer evening.

Away from, not toward. As if the garden roses were a little hobby of the dead. As if the deer pellets in the pale grass and the wavering moon and the rondure—as they used to say, upping the ante—of heaven

were admirable completely, but only as common nouns of a plainer intention,
moon
,
shit
,
sky
,

as if spirit attended to plainness only, the more complicated forms exhausting it, tossed-off grape stems becoming crystal chandeliers,

as if radiance were the meaning of meaning, and justice responsible to daydream not only for the strict beauty of denial,

but as a need to reinvent the inner form of wishing.

Only the force of the brushstroke keeps the lilacs from pathos—the hes and shes of the comedy may or may not get together, but if they are to get at all,

then the interval created by
if
, to which mind and breath attend, nervous as the grazing animals the first brushes painted,

has become habitable space, lived in beyond wishing.

1.

September sun, a little fog in the mornings. No sanctified terror. At night Luke says, “How do you connect a
b
to an
a
in cursive?” He is bent to the task with such absorption that he doesn't notice the Scarlatti on the stereo, which he would in other circumstances turn off. He has said that chamber music sounds to him worried. I go out and look at the early stars. They glow faintly; faintly the mountain is washed in the color of sunset, at that season a faded scarlet like the petals of the bougainvillea which is also fading. A power saw, somewhere in the neighborhood, is enacting someone's idea of more pleasure, an extra room or a redwood tub. It hums and stops, hums and stops.

2.

In the dream there was a face saying no. Not with words. Brow furrow, crow's-feet, lip curl: no, it is forbidden to you, no. But it was featureless, you could put your hand through it and feel cold on the other side. It was not the father-face saying no among the torsos and pillars of aluminum nor the mother-face weeping no, no, no at the gate that guards rage; it was not even the idiot face of the obedient brother tacking his list of a hundred and seventy-five reasons why not on the greenhouse door. This face spits on archetypes, spits on caves, rainbows, the little human luxury of historical explanation. The meadow, you remember the meadow? And the air in June which held the scent of it as the woman in religious iconography holds the broken son? You can go into that meadow, the light routed by a brilliant tenderness of green, a cool V carved by a muskrat in the blue-gray distance of the pond, black-eyed Susans everywhere. You can go there.