The Apple Trees at Olema

by Robert Hass

  It’s only your feeling you assuage.

  You didn’t interfere. Her gold wandering of hair,

  she told you that another time. The father

  at the county fair was whaling on the boy

  with fists. There was music in the background

  and a clown walked by and looked and looked away.

  She told you then, gold and practical advice.

  You wanted one and craved the other.

  Say “mother.” No. Say it. No. She shut the door?

  I wish she had. I saw the shadow cast there

  on the floor. What did you think? I asked her,

  actually. She said she hurt her lip. And

  took a drink? or the shadow did. I didn’t think.

  I knew she was lying. A child could see that.

  You were a child. Ah, this is the part

  where he parades his wound. He was a child.

  It is the law of things: the little billy goat

  goes first. Happily, he ’s not a morsel

  for the troll. Say “Dad, I’ve got a bite.”

  That’s different. Then you say, “Reel it in.”

  They’re feeling fear and wonder, then.

  That’s when you teach them they can take the world

  in hand. You do? Sometimes I do. Carefully.

  They beat the child again when they get home.

  All right. Assume the children are all right.

  They’re singing in the kibbutzim. The sun is rising.

  Let’s get past this part. The kindergarten

  is a garden and they face their fears in stories

  your voice makes musical and then they sleep.

  They hear the sirens? Yes, they hear the sirens.

  That part can’t be helped. No one beats them, though.

  And there are no lies they recognize. They know

  you’re with them and they fall asleep. What then?

  Get past this part. It is a garden. Then they’re grown.

  What then? Say “groan.” I say what to say,

  you don’t. They’re all OK, and grown. What then?

  2.

  Then? Then, the truth is, then they fall in love.

  oh no. Oh yes. Big subject. Big shadow.

  I saw it slant across the floor, linoleum

  in fact, and very dirty. Sad and dirty.

  Because it lacked intention? Well, it did lack art.

  Let’s leave the shadow part alone. They fall in love.

  What then? I want to leave this too.

  It has its songs. Too many. I know them all.

  It doesn’t seem appropriate somehow. It was summer.

  He saw her wandering through a field of grass.

  It was the sweetest fire. Later, in the fall, it rained.

  You loved her then? In rain? and gold October?

  I would have died for her. Tra-la. oh yes,

  tra-la. We took long walks. You gather sadness

  from a childhood to make a gift of it.

  I gave her mine. Some gift. Is it so bad?

  Sadness is a pretty word. Shadow’s

  shadow. And once there was a flood. Heavy rains,

  and then the tide came in. I left her house

  at midnight. It was pouring. I hitched a ride,

  which stalled. The car in front of us had stopped.

  The water rose across the road and ran downhill.

  You’d forgotten this. I remember now. My knee

  was in a cast. I hopped to the car in front,

  the one that stalled. The driver’s tongue stuck out,

  a pale fat plum. His eyes bulged. An old man

  in a gray felt hat. And the red lids flickered,

  so he wasn’t dead. What did you do? Got in,

  shoved him aside, and tried to start the car.

  What did you feel then? Wonderful. Like cleaning fish.

  Your hands are bloody and you do the job.

  It reminds you of a poem now? Yes,

  the one about the fall that Bashō liked.

  “The maple leaf becomes a midwife ’s hand.”

  The engine skipped and sank, twice. Then it started.

  And I drove. The hospital was just a mile away

  but near the creek. I thought the water

  would be even higher. Interesting, of course.

  This is the part about falling in love?

  I left her house. We were necking, remember,

  on a soft green velvet couch. What then?

  I took the downhill road and floored it.

  A gush spewed up and blurred the windshield.

  I couldn’t see a thing. The car sputtered,

  surged, sputtered, surged, and died. And

  he was dead. Who was he? Some old man.

  That was the winter that you fell in love?

  It was. Did you feel bad? No, I tried.

  Do you believe in that? Now? I’m not sure.

  He looked like a baby when they got him out

  and raindrops bounced off raindrops on his face.

  It didn’t cost me anything.

  Anything?

  PRIVILEGE OF BEING

  Many are making love. Up above, the angels

  in the unshaken ether and crystal of human longing

  are braiding one another’s hair, which is strawberry blond

  and the texture of cold rivers. They glance

  down from time to time at the awkward ecstasy—

  it must look to them like featherless birds

  splashing in the spring puddle of a bed—

  and then one woman, she is about to come,

  peels back the man’s shut eyelids and says,

  look at me, and he does. or is it the man

  tugging the curtain rope in that dark theater?

  Anyway, they do, they look at each other;

  two beings with evolved eyes, rapacious,

  startled, connected at the belly in an unbelievably sweet

  lubricious glue, stare at each other,

  and the angels are desolate. They hate it. They shudder pathetically

  like lithographs of Victorian beggars

  with perfect features and alabaster skin hawking rags

  in the lewd alleys of the novel.

  All of creation is offended by this distress.

  It is like the keening sound the moon makes sometimes,

  rising. The lovers especially cannot bear it,

  it fills them with unspeakable sadness, so that

  they close their eyes again and hold each other, each

  feeling the mortal singularity of the body

  they have enchanted out of death for an hour or so,

  and one day, running at sunset, the woman says to the man,

  I woke up feeling so sad this morning because I realized

  that you could not, as much as I love you,

  dear heart, cure my loneliness,

  wherewith she touched his cheek to reassure him

  that she did not mean to hurt him with this truth.

  And the man is not hurt exactly,

  he understands that life has limits, that people

  die young, fail at love,

  fail of their ambitions. He runs beside her, he thinks

  of the sadness they have gasped and crooned their way out of

  coming, clutching each other with old, invented

  forms of grace and clumsy gratitude, ready

  to be alone again, or dissatisfied, or merely

  companionable like the couples on the summer beach

  reading magazine articles about intimacy between the sexes

  to themselves, and to each other,

  and to the immense, illiterate, consoling angels.

  NATURAL THEOLOGY

  White daisies against the burnt orange of the windowframe,

  lusterless redwood in the nickel gray of winter,

  in the distance turbulence of water—the green regions

  of the morn
ing reflect whatever can be gained, normally,

  by light, then give way to the blue regions of the afternoon

  which do not reflect so much as they remember,

  as if the light, one will all morning, yielded to a doubleness

  in things—plucked skins of turkeys in an ill-lit butchershop

  in the pitch-dark forenoon of a dreary day, or a stone bridge

  in a small town, a cool café, tables with a violin-back sheen,

  ferns like private places of the body distanced and made cool—

  images not quite left behind rising as an undertow

  of endless transformation against the blurring world

  outside the window where, after the morning clarities,

  the faint reflection of a face appears; among the images

  a road, repetitively, with meadow rue and yarrow

  whitening its edges, and pines shadowing the cranberry brush,

  and the fluting of one bird where the road curves and disappears,

  becoming that gap or lack which is the oldest imagination

  of need, defined more sharply by the silver-gray region

  just before the sun goes down and the clouds fade

  through rose to bruise to the city-pigeon color of a sky

  going dark and the wind comes up in brushstroke silhouettes

  of trees and to your surprise the window mirrors back to you

  a face open, curious, and tender; as dance is defined

  by the body’s possibilities arranged, this dance

  belongs to the composures and the running down of things

  in the used sugars of five thirty: a woman straightening

  a desk turns her calendar to another day, signaling

  that it is another day where the desk is concerned

  and that there is in her days what doesn’t belong to the desk;

  a kid turns on TV, flops on the couch to the tinny sound

  of little cartoon parents quarreling; a man in a bar

  orders a drink, watches ice bob in the blond fluid,

  he sighs and looks around; sad at the corners, nagged by wind,

  others with packages; others dreaming, picking their noses

  dreamily while they listen to the radio describe configurations

  of the traffic they are stuck in as the last light

  like held breath flickers among mud hens on the bay,

  the black bodies elapsing as the dark comes on, and the face

  in the window seems harder and more clear. The religion

  or the region of the dark makes soup and lights a fire,

  plays backgammon with children on the teeth or the stilettos

  of the board, reads books, does dishes, listens

  to the wind, listens to the stars imagined to be singing

  invisibly, goes out to be regarded by the moon, walks

  dogs, feeds cats, makes love in postures so various,

  with such varying attention and intensity and hope,

  it enacts the dispersion of tongues among the people

  of the earth—compris? Versteh’—and sleeps with sticky genitals

  the erasures and the peace of sleep: exactly the half-moon

  holds, and the city twinkles in particular windows, throbs

  in its accumulated glow which is also and more blindingly

  the imagination of need from which the sun keeps rising into morning light,

  because desires do not split themselves up, there is one desire

  touching the many things, and it is continuous.

  TAHOE IN AUGUST

  What summer proposes is simply happiness:

  heat early in the morning, jays

  raucous in the pines. Frank and Ellen have a tennis game

  at nine, Bill and Cheryl sleep on the deck

  to watch a shower of summer stars. Nick and Sharon

  stayed in, sat and talked the dark on,

  drinking tea, and Jeanne walked into the meadow

  in a white smock to write in her journal

  by a grazing horse who seemed to want the company.

  Some of them will swim in the afternoon.

  Someone will drive to the hardware store to fetch

  new latches for the kitchen door. Four o’clock;

  the joggers jogging—it is one of them who sees

  down the flowering slope the woman with her notebook

  in her hand beside the white horse, gesturing, her hair

  from a distance the copper color of the hummingbirds

  the slant light catches on the slope; the hikers

  switchback down the canyon from the waterfall;

  the readers are reading, Anna is about to meet Vronsky,

  that nice M. Swann is dining in Combray

  with the aunts, and Carrie has come to Chicago.

  What they want is happiness: someone to love them,

  children, a summer by the lake. The woman who sets aside

  her book blinks against the fuzzy dark,

  reentering the house. Her daughter drifts downstairs;

  out late the night before, she has been napping,

  and she ’s cross. Her mother tells her David telephoned.

  “He’s such a dear,” the mother says, “I think

  I make him nervous.” The girl tosses her head as the horse

  had done in the meadow while Jeanne read it her dream.

  “You can call him now, if you want,” the mother says,

  “I’ve got to get the chicken started,

  I won’t listen.” “Did I say you would?”

  the girl says quickly. The mother who has been slapped

  this way before and done the same herself another summer

  on a different lake says, “ouch.” The girl shrugs

  sulkily. “I’m sorry.” Looking down: “Something

  about the way you said that pissed me off.”

  “Hannibal has wandered off,” the mother says,

  wryness in her voice, she is thinking it is August,

  “why don’t you see if he ’s at the Finleys’ house

  again.” The girl says, “God.” The mother: “He loves

  small children. It’s livelier for him there.”

  The daughter, awake now, flounces out the door,

  which slams. It is for all of them the sound of summer.

  The mother she looks like stands at the counter snapping beans.

  THIN AIR

  What if I did not mention death to get started

  or how love fails in our well-meaning hands

  or what my parents in the innocence of their malice

  toward each other did to me. What if I let the light

  pour down on the mountain meadow, mule ears

  dry already in the August heat, and the sweet

  heavy scent of sage rising into it, marrying

  what light it can, a wartime marriage,

  summer is brief in these mountains, the

  ticker-tape parade of snow will bury it

  in no time, in the excess the world gives

  up there, and down here, you want snow? you think

  you have seen infinity watching the sky shuffle

  the pink cards of thirty thousand flamingoes

  on the Serengeti Plain? this is my blush,

  she said, turning toward you, eyes downcast

  demurely, a small smile playing at her mouth,

  playing what? house, playing I am the sister

  and author of your sorrow, playing the Lord

  God loves the green earth and I am a nun

  of his visitations, you want snow, I’ll give you

  snow, she said, this is my flamingoes-in-migration

  blush. Winter will bury it. You had better

  sleep through that cold, or sleep in a solitary bed

  in a city where the stone glistens darkly

  in the morning rain, you are allowed a comforter,

  silky in texture t
hough it must be blue,

  and you can listen to music in the morning,

  the notes nervous as light reflected in a fountain,

  and you can drink your one cup of fragrant tea

  and rinse the cup and sweep your room and

  the sadness you are fighting off while the gulls’

  calls beat about the church towers out the window

  and you smell the salt smell of the sea

  is the dream you don’t remember of the meadow

  sleeping under fifteen feet of snow though you half

  recall the tracks of some midsized animal,

  a small fox or a large hare, and the deadly

  silence, and the blinded-eye gray of the winter sky:

  it is sleeping, the meadow, don’t wake it.

  You have to go to the bottom of the raveling.

  The surgical pan, and the pump, and the bits

  of life that didn’t take floating in the smell

  of alcohol, or the old man in the bed spitting up

  black blood like milk of the other world, or the way

  middle-aged women from poorer countries are the ones

  who clean up after and throw the underwear away.

  Hang on to the luxury of the way she used

  to turn to you, don’t abandon it, summer

  is short, no one ever told you differently,

  this is a good parade, this is the small hotel,

  the boathouse on the dock, and the moon thin,

  just silvering above the pines, and you are starting

  to sweat now, having turned north out of the meadow

  and begun the ascent up granite and through buckthorn

  to the falls. There is a fine film on your warm skin

  that you notice. You are water, light and water and thin air,

  and you’re breathing deeply now—a little dead marmot

  like a rag of auburn hair swarms with ants beside the trail—

  and you can hear the rush of water in the distance

  as it takes its leap into the air and falls. In the winter

  city she is walking toward you or away from you,

  the fog condensing and dripping from the parapets

  of old apartments and from the memory of intimate garments

  that dried on the balcony in summer, even in the spring.

  Do you understand? You can brew your one cup of tea

  and you can drink it, the leaves were grown in Ceylon,

  the plump young man who packed them was impatient,

  he is waiting for news of a scholarship to Utrecht,

  he is pretty sure he will rot in this lousy place

  if he doesn’t get it, and you can savor the last sip,