The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems

New Poems

JULY NOTEBOOK: THE BIRDS

Sleep like the down elevator’s

imitation of a memory lapse.

Then early light.

Why were you born, voyager?

one is not born for a reason,

though there is a skein of causes.

out of yellowish froth,

cells began to divide, or so they say,

and feed on sunlight,

for no reason.

After that life wanted life.

You are awake now?

I am awake now.

In front of me six African men, each of them tall

and handsome, all of them impeccably tailored;

all six ordered Coca-Cola at dinner (Muslim,

it seems, a trade delegation? diplomats?);

the young American girl next to me

is a veterinary assistant from DC;

I asked her if she kept records

or held animals. A little of both,

she says. She ’s on her way to Stockholm.

The young man in the window seat, also American,

black hair not combed any time

in recent memory, expensive Italian shirt,

gold crucifix fastened to his earlobe,

scarab tattooed in the soft skin

between thumb and forefinger of his left hand,

is reading a Portuguese phrasebook.

A lover perhaps in Lisbon or Faro.

There should be a phrase for this passenger tenderness,

the flickering perceptions like the whitecaps

later on the Neva, when the wind

off the Gulf of Finland, roughens the surface

of the river and spills the small petals

of white lilacs on the gray stone

of the embankment. Above it two black-faced gulls,

tilted in the air, cry out sharply, and sharply.

They are built like exclamation points, woodpeckers.

Are you there? It’s summer. Are you smeared with the juice of cherries?

The light this morning is touching everything,

the grasses by the pond,

and the wind-chivvied water,

and the aspens on the bank, and the one white fir on its sunward side,

and the blue house down the road

and its white banisters which are glowing on top

and shadowy on the underside,

which intensifies the luster of the surfaces that face the sun

as it does to the leaves of the aspen.

Are you there? Maybe it would be best

to be the shadow side of a pine needle

on a midsummer morning

(to be in imagination and for a while

on a midsummer morning

the shadow side of a pine needle).

The sun has concentrated to a glowing point

in the unlit bulb of the porchlight on the porch

of the blue house down the road.

It almost hurts to look at it.

Are you there? Are you soaked in dreams still?

The sky is inventing a Web site called newest azure.

There are four kinds of birdsong outside

and a methodical early morning saw.

No, not a saw. It’s a boy on a scooter and the sun

on his black helmet is concentrated to a point of glowing light.

He isn’t death come to get us

and he isn’t truth arriving in a black T-shirt

chevroned up the arms in tongues of flame.

Are you there? For some reason I’m imagining

the small hairs on your neck, even though I know

you are dread and the muse

and my mortal fate and a secret.

It’s a boy on a scooter on a summer morning.

Did I say the light was touching everything?

After Coleridge and for Milosz: Late July

I didn’t go hiking with the others this morning

on the dusty trail past the firehouse,

past the massive, asymmetrical, vanilla-scented

Jeffrey pine, among the spikes of buckbrush

and the spicy sage and the gray-green ceanothus,

listening to David’s descriptions of the terrifying

efficiencies of a high mountain ecosystem,

the white fir’s cost-benefit analysis

of the usefulness of its lower limbs,

the ants herding aphids—they store the sugars

in the aphid’s rich excretions—on the soft green

mesas of a mule ear leaf. I think of the old man’s

dark study jammed with books in seven languages

as the headquarters of his military campaign

against nothingness. Immense egoism in it,

of course, the narcissism of a wound,

but actual making, actual work. one of the things

he believed was that our poems could be better

than our motives. So who cares why

he wrote those lines about the hairstyle

of his piano teacher in Wilno in the 1920s

or the building with spumy baroque cornices

that collapsed on her in 1942. David and the others

would by now have reached the waterfall.

There were things he could not have known

as he sat beside her on the mahogany bench,

that he could only have seen, or recomposed,

remembering the smell of her powder,

as a sixty-five-year-old man on another continent.

Looking out a small window at an early spring rain:

that, if she taught piano, she was an artistic girl,

that she didn’t have family money, that she must have

dreamed once of performing and discovered

the limits of her gift and that her hair,

piled atop her head and, thickly braided,

wound about her beautifully shaped skull

(which the boy with his worn sheaf of Chopin études

would hardly have noticed) was formed

by some bohemian elegance and raffishness

in the style of her music-student youth, so that he,

the poet at the outer edges of middle age,

with what comes after that visible before him

could think unbidden of her reddish Belle Epoque hair

and its powdery faint odor of apricot

that he had not noticed and of the hours

she must have spent, thousands in a lifetime,

tending to her braids, and think that the young,

himself then with his duties and resentments,

are always walking past some already perished

dream of stylishness or beauty that survives

or half-survives in the familiar and therefore tedious,

therefore anonymous, outfitting of one ’s elders,

and that her gentility would have required

(the rain in green California may have let up

a little and quieted to dripping in the ferns)

the smallest rooms in the most expensive quarter

of the city she could manage—he’d have recalled

then rows of yellow bindings of French novels

on her well-dusted shelves—and this was why

he visited her in that gleaming parlor room

on the Street of St. Peter of the Rock, and why,

he would hear years later in a letter

from a classmate, the stone that crushed her

was not concrete or the local limestone,

but pure chunks of white, carefully quarried

Carerra marble. Something in him identified,

must have, with the darkness he thought

he was contending against. A child practicing

holding its breath, as a form of power,

a threat (but against whom? To extort

what?). or a lover perfecting a version

of the silent treatment from some strategy

of anticipatory anger at the failure of love.

So he may have had to rouse himself

against the waste, against the vast stupidity

and cruelty and waste and wasted pathos,

to hear the music in which to say that he ’d noticed,

after all the years, that her small body

had been crushed expensively. one summer

by that waterfall I saw a hummingbird,

a calliope, hovering and glistening

above the water’s spray and the hemlock,

then dropping down into it and rising

and wobbling and beating its furious wings

and dropping again and rising and glistening. The others

should be there by now, and it’s possible the bird

is back this year. They’d have made their way

down the dusty trail and over the ledge of granite

to the creek’s edge and that cascade of spray.

For C.R.

What do you mean you have nothing?

You can’t have nothing. Aren’t there three green apples

on the table in an earth-brown bowl? Weren’t there

three apples for three goddesses in the story

and the fellow had to pick—no, there was one apple

and three goddesses, as in the well-known remark

that all of politics is two pieces of cake

and three children. Aren’t there three yellow roses

on the counter in a clear glass vase among purple spikes

of another flower that resembles a little

the Nile hyacinth you saw in lush borders

along the green canal at Puerto Escondido?

Do you remember Juan called them Lent flowers,

which made you see that the white gush of the calyx

was an eastering, and you looked at Connie

with her shaved head after chemo and her bright,

wide eyes that wanted to miss nothing,

and do you remember that the surface of the water

came suddenly alive: a violent roiling and leaping

of small fish, and Juan, pointing into the water

at what had got them leaping, shouted Barracuda,

and that the young pelicans came swooping in

to practice their new awkward skill of fishing

on the small, terrified, silvery river fish? And

the black-headed terns, a flock of them,

joined in, hovering and plunging like needles

into the churning water? All in one explosion:

green lagoon, barracuda, silver fish, brown pelicans,

plunging terns, Juan’s laugh, appalled, alive,

and Connie’s wide blue eyes and the river smell

coming up as the water quieted again. of course,

there were three apples, one for beauty,

and one for terror, and one for Connie ’s eyes

in the quiet after, mangrove swallows in the air,

shy, white-faced ibises foraging among the hyacinths.

Late afternoons in June the fog rides in

across the ridge of pines, ghosting them,

and settling on the bay to give a muted gray

luster to the last hours of light and take back

what we didn’t know at midday we’d experience

as lack: the blue of summer and the dry spiced scent

of the summer woods. It’s as if some cold salt god

had wandered inland for a nap. You still see

herons fishing in the shallows, a kingfisher or an osprey

emerges for a moment out of the high, drifting mist,

then vanishes again. And the soft, light green leaves

of the thimbleberry and the ridged coffeeberry leaves

and the needles of the redwoods and pines look more sprightly

in the cool gray air with the long dusk coming on,

since fog is their natural element. I had it in mind

that this description of the weather would be a way

to say things come and go, a way of subsuming

the rhythms of arrival and departure to a sense

of how brief the time is on a summer afternoon

when the sun is warm on your neck and the world

might as well be a dog sleeping on a porch, or a child

for whom an afternoon is endless, endless. Time:

thick honey, and no one saying good-bye.

AUGUST NOTEBOOK: A DEATH

1. River Bicycle Peony

I woke up thinking abouy my brothr’s body.

that q That was my first bit of early morning typing

so the first dignity, it turns out, is to get the spelling right.

I woke up thinking about my brother’s body.

Apparently it’s at the medical examiner’s morgue.

I found myself wondering whether he was naked

yet and whose job it was to take clothes off

and when they did it. It seemed unnecessary

to undress his body until they performed the exam

and that is going to happen later this morning

and so I found myself hoping that he was dressed

still, though smell may be an issue, or hygiene.

When the police do a forced entry for the purpose

of a welfare check and the deceased person is alone,

the body goes to the medical examiner’s morgue

in the section for those deaths in which no evidence

of foul play is involved, so the examination

for cause of death is fairly routine. Two policemen,

for some reason I imagine they were young,

found my brother. His body was in the bed

which was a mattress on the floor. He was lying

on his back, according to Angela, my brother’s friend,

who lives nearby and has her own troubles

and always introduced herself as my brother’s

personal assistant, and he seemed peaceful.

There would have been nothing in the room

but the mattress and a microwave, an ashtray,

I suppose, cartons and food wrappers he hadn’t

thrown away and the little plastic subscription

bottles that he referred to as his ’scrips.

They must have called the ME’s ambulance

and that was probably a team of three.

When I woke, I visualized this narrative

and thought it would be shorter. I thought

that what would represent my feelings

would be the absence of metaphor.

But then, at the third line, I discovered

the three line stanza and that it was

going to be the second dignity. So

I imagine he is in one of those aluminium

cubicles I’ve seen in the movies,

dressed or not. I also imagine that,

if they undressed him, and perhaps washed

his body or gave it an alcohol rub

to disinfect it, that that was the job

of some emigrant from a hot, poor country.

Anyway, he is dressed in this stanza,

which mimics the terza rima of Dante’s comedy

and is a form that Wallace Stevens liked

to use, and also my dear friend Robert.

And seemed peaceful is a kind of metaphor.

2. Sudden and Grateful Memory of Mississippi John Hurt

Because I woke again thinking of my brother’s body

and why anyone would care in some future

that poetry addresses how a body is transferred

from the medical examiner’s office,

which is organized by local government

and issues a certificate establishing that the person

in question is in fact dead and names the cause

or causes, to the mortuary or cremation society,

most of which are privately owned businesses

and run for profit and until recently tended

to be family businesses with skills and decorums

passed from father to son, and often quite ethnically

specific, in a country like ours made from crossers

of borders, as if, in the intimacy of death,

some tribal shame or squeamishness or sense

of propriety asserted itself so that the Irish

buried the Irish and the Italians the Italians.

In the south in the early years of the last century

it was the one business in which a black person

could grow wealthy and pass on a trade

and a modicum of independence to his children.

I know this because Judith wrote a piece about it

for which she interviewed fourth-generation

African-American morticians in oakland

whose grandfathers and great-grandfathers

had buried the dead in cotton towns on the Delta

or along the Brazos River in Texas, passing on

to their children who had gone west an order

of doing things and symbolic forms of courtesy

for the bereaved and sequences of behavior

at wakes and funerals, so that, for example,

the eldest woman in the maternal line

entered the chapel first, and what prayers

were said in what order. During Prohibition

they even sold the white lightning to the men

who were allowed to slip outside and take a nip

and talk about the dead while the cries

and gospel-song-voiced contralto moans

of grief that could sound like curious elation

rose inside. Also the rules for burial or burning.

Griefs and rituals and inside them cosmologies.

And I thought of Mississippi John Hurt’s

great song about Louis Collins and its terrible

tenderness which can’t be reproduced here

because so much of it is in the picking

of the six-string guitar and in his sweet,

reedy old man’s voice: "And when they heard

that Louis was dead,

all the women dressed in red.

Angels laid him away.

They laid him six feet under the clay.

Angels laid him away."

3.

You can fall a long way in sunlight.

You can fall a long way in the rain.

The ones who don’t take the old white horse

take the morning train.

When you go down

into the city of the dead

with its whitewashed walls and winding alleys

and avenues of autumnal lindens and the heavy bells

tolling by the sea, crowds

appear in all directions,

having left their benches and tiered plazas,

laying aside their occupations of reverie

and gossip and the memory of breathing—

at least in the most reliable stories,

which are the ones the poets tell—

to hear what scraps of news they can

from this world where the air is thin

at high altitudes and smells of pine

and of almost perfect density in the valleys

where trees on summer afternoons sometimes

throw violet shadows across sidewalks.

only the arborist in the park never stirs

for the new arrivals; he is not incurious,

but he has his work. It is he who decides

which limbs get lopped off

in the city of the dead.

You can fall a long way in sunlight.

You can fall a long way in the rain.

The ones who don’t take the old white horse

take the evening train.

4.

Today his body is consigned to the flames

and I begin to understand why people

would want to carry a body to the river’s edge

and build a platform of wood and burn it

in the wind and scatter the ashes in the river.

As if to say, take him, fire, take him, air,

and, river, take him. Downstream. Downstream.

Watch the ashes disappear in the fast water

or, in a small flaring of anger, turn away, walk back

toward the markets and the hum of life, not quite

saying to yourself There, the hell with it, it’s done.

I said to him once, when he’d gotten into some scrape

or other, "You know, you have the impulse control

of a ferret. And he said, Yeah? I don’t know

what a ferret is, but I get greedy. I don’t mean to,

but I get greedy." An old grubber’s beard, going gray,

a wheelchair, sweats, a street person’s baseball cap.

"I’ve been thinking about Billie Holiday, you know

if she were around now, she ’d be nothing. You know

what I mean? Hip-hop? Never. She had to be born

at a time when they were writing the kind of songs

and people were listening to the kind of songs

she was great at singing." And I would say,

"You just got evicted from your apartment,

you can’t walk and you have no money, so

I don’t want to talk to you about Billie Holiday

right now, okay. And he would say, You know,

I’m like Mom. I mean, she really had a genius

for denial, don’t you think? And the thing is,

you know, she was a pretty happy person."

And I would say, "She was not a happy person.

She was panicky, crippled by guilt at her drinking,

and she was evasive to herself about herself,

and so she couldn’t actually connect with anybody,

and her only defense was to be chronically cheerful."

And he would say, Worse things than cheerful.

Well, I am through with those arguments,

except in my head, and not through, I see, with the habit—

I thought this poem would end downriver downriver—

of worrying about where you are and how you’re doing.

VARIATIONS ON A PASSAGE IN EDWARD ABBEY

A dune begins with an obstacle—a stone, a shrub, a log,

anything heavy enough to resist being moved by wind.

This obstacle forms a wind shadow on its leeward side,

making eddies in the currents, now fast, now slow, of the air,

exactly as a rock in a stream causes an eddy in the