The Apple Trees at Olema

by Robert Hass

  Who was probably baiting line for sand sharks

  As they spoke. He fell asleep imagining

  The man setting the line, pouring coffee,

  Blowing on his hands, shivering against the cold.

  She was awake beside him, her panic like the wind.

  4.

  It was hot. She was stripping a kitchen chair

  She’d bought at a garage sale up the bay.

  She was working indoors because the sun

  outside would dry the paint remover

  As fast as she applied it. So she worked

  In the kitchen, opening the windows

  And hoping for a little breeze. Which came and went.

  There were three layers of paint on the chair,

  She discovered, white, an evergreen shade of green,

  Then red, and underneath the paint what looked like cedar.

  She scraped hard and watched her mind

  Shying from the notion of endeavor.

  TWIN DOLPHINS

  A paradise of palm and palm and palm

  And glittering sea.

  Rocks, pelicans, then pure horizon,

  Angular white villas on a hillside

  Tumbling to the sea.

  “Gracias.” “De nada.”

  A flycatcher in an ironwood,

  Sulfur belly, whitish throat,

  A thin rind of brown-gold on ash-gray wings.

  Utterly alert. He has his work to do.

  After breakfast they went their separate ways.

  Gulls and lulls and glittering sea.

  “The papaya was lovely this morning.”

  “Yes, but the guava was not quite ripe.”

  Expressionist crucifix: the frigate bird.

  Sand-colored day, bright heat.

  “What do you call a lot of pelicans?”

  “A flotilla.” “Ah, a little float.”

  “A baby fleet.” Smell of vanilla

  In the desert, and, oddly, maple

  (yerba santa?). Making love after,

  To the sound of waves,

  The sound of waves.

  Eden, limbo.

  Fan palms and the sea; festoons

  of big-leaved fan palms

  Fanning out; the sea on which they pitch

  Raking sand and raking sand, sighing

  And pitching and raking sand.

  Harlequin sparrows in a coral tree.

  one halcyon harrying another in the desert sky,

  Blue, and would be turquoise,

  Would be stone.

  Bone china handle of a coffee mug: the moon.

  What’s old? The silence

  In this black, humped porous mass

  of “prefossiliferous rock”

  The ocean beats against.

  No animals, no plants,

  The tides of fire before there was a sea.

  Before skin, words.

  “Sonorous nutshells rattling vacantly.”

  Brilliant welter, azure welter,

  occurs—the world occurs—

  only in the present tense.

  “I’ll see you after lunch.”

  (Kisses him lightly)

  “—As if raspberry tanagers in palms,

  High up in orange air, were barbarous.”

  THEN TIME

  In winter, in a small room, a man and a woman

  Have been making love for hours. Exhausted,

  very busy wringing out each other’s bodies,

  They look at one another suddenly and laugh.

  “What is this?” he says. “I can’t get enough of you,”

  She says, a woman who thinks of herself as not given

  To cliché. She runs her fingers across his chest,

  Tentative touches, as if she were testing her wonder.

  He says, “Me too.” And she, beginning to be herself

  Again, “You mean you can’t get enough of you either?”

  “I mean,” he takes her arms in his hands and shakes them,

  “Where does this come from?” She cocks her head

  And looks into his face. “Do you really want to know?”

  “Yes,” he says. “Self-hatred,” she says, “longing for God.”

  Kisses him again. “It’s not what it is,” a wry shrug,

  “it’s where it comes from.” Kisses his bruised mouth

  A second time, a third. Years later, in another city,

  They’re having dinner in a quiet restaurant near a park.

  Fall. Earlier that day, hard rain: leaves, brass-colored

  And smoky crimson, flying everywhere. Twenty years older,

  She is very beautiful. An astringent person. She ’d become,

  She said, an obsessive gardener, her daughters grown.

  He’s trying not to be overwhelmed by love or pity

  Because he sees she has no hands. He thinks

  She must have given them away. He imagines,

  very clearly, how she wakes some mornings

  (He has a vivid memory of her younger self, stirred

  From sleep, flushed, just opening her eyes)

  To momentary horror because she can’t remember

  What she did with them, why they were gone,

  And then remembers, and calms herself, so that the day

  Takes on its customary sequence once again.

  She asks him if he thinks about her. “occasionally,”

  He says, smiling. “And you?” “Not much,” she says,

  “I think it’s because we never existed inside time.”

  He studies her long fingers, a pianist’s hands,

  or a gardener’s, strong, much-used, as she fiddles

  With her wineglass and he understands, vaguely,

  That it must be his hands that are gone. Then

  He’s describing a meeting that he ’d sat in all day,

  Chaired by someone they’d felt, many years before,

  Mutually superior to. “You know the expression

  ‘A perfect fool,’” she ’d said, and he had liked her tone

  of voice so much. She begins a story of the company

  In Maine she orders bulbs from, begun by a Polish refugee

  Married to a French-Canadian separatist from Quebec.

  It’s a story with many surprising turns and a rare

  Chocolate-black lily at the end. He ’s listening,

  Studying her face, still turning over her remark.

  He decides that she thinks more symbolically

  Than he does and that it seemed to have saved her,

  For all her fatalism, from certain kinds of pain.

  She finds herself thinking what a literal man he is,

  Notices, as if she were recalling it, his pleasure

  In the menu, and the cooking, and the architecture of the room.

  It moves her—in the way that earnest limitation

  Can be moving, and she is moved by her attraction to him.

  Also by what he was to her. She sees her own avidity

  To live then, or not to not have lived might be more accurate,

  From a distance, the way a driver might see from the road

  A startled deer running across an open field in the rain.

  Wild thing. Here and gone. De
ath made it poignant, or,

  If not death exactly, which she ’d come to think of

  As creatures seething in a compost heap, then time.

  THAT MUSIC

  The creek’s silver in the sun of almost August,

  And bright dry air, and last runnels of snowmelt,

  Percolating through the roots of mountain grasses,

  vinegar weed, golden smoke, or meadow rust,

  Do they confer, do the lovers’ bodies

  In the summer dusk, his breath, her sleeping face

  Confer—, does the slow breeze in the pines?

  If you were the interpreter, if that were your task.

  CZESŁAW MIŁOSZ: IN MEMORIAM

  In his last years, when he had moved back to KrakÓw, we worked on the translation of his poems by e-mail and phone. Around the time of his ninetieth birthday, he sent me a set of poems entitled “Oh!” I wrote to ask him if he meant “Oh!” or “O!” and he asked me what the difference was and said that perhaps we should talk on the phone. On the phone I explained that “Oh!” was a long breath of wonder, that the equivalent was, possibly, “Wow!” and that “O!” was a caught breath of wonder and surprise, more like “Huh!” and he said, after a pause, “O! for sure.” Here are the translations we made:

  O!

  1.

  O happiness! To see an iris.

  The color of indigo, as Ella’s dress was once, and the delicate scent was

  like that of her skin.

  O what a mumbling to describe an iris that was blooming when Ella did

  not exist, nor all our kingdoms, nor all our desmesnes!

  2.

  GUSTAV KLIMT (1862–1918)

  Judith (detail)

  OESTERREICHISCHE GALERIE

  O lips half-opened, eyes half-closed, the rosy nipple of your unveiled nakedness, Judith!

  And they, rushing forward in an attack with your image preserved in their memories, torn apart by bursts of artillery shells, falling down into pits, into putrefaction.

  O the massive gold of your brocade, of your necklace with its rows of precious stones, Judith, for such a farewell.

  3.

  SALVATOR ROSA (1615–1673)

  A Landscape with Figures

  YALE UNIVERSITY MUSEUM

  O the quiet of water under the rocks, and the yellow silence of the afternoon, and flat white clouds reflected!

  Figures in the foreground dressing themselves after bathing, figures on the other shore tiny, and in their activities mysterious.

  O most ordinary, taken from dailiness and elevated to a place like this earth and not like this earth!

  4.

  EDWARD HOPPER (1882–1967)

  Hotel Room

  THYSSEN COLLECTION, MADRID

  O what sadness unaware that it’s sadness!

  What despair that doesn’t know it’s despair!

  A business woman, her unpacked suitcase on the floor, sits on a bed half undressed, in red underwear, her hair impeccable; she has a piece of paper in her hand, probably with numbers.

  Who are you? Nobody will ask. She doesn’t know either.

  HORACE: THREE IMITATIONS

  1.

  ODES, 1.38 PERSICOS ODI, PUER, APPARATUS

  I hate Persian filigree, and garlands

  Woven out of lime tree bark.

  on no account are you to hunt up, for my sake,

  The late-blooming rose.

  Plain myrtle will do nicely for a crown.

  It’s not unbecoming on you as you pour

  or on me as I sip, in the arbor’s shade,

  A glass of cool wine.

  Here, by the way, is your manumission.

  Let it be noted that after two thousand years

  The poet Horace, he of the suave Greek meters, has

  At last freed his slaves.

  2.

  ODES, 3.2 ANGUSTAM AMICE PAUPERIEM PATI

  Let the young, toughened by a soldiers’ training,

  Learn to bear hardship gladly

  And to terrify Parthian insurgents

  From the turrets of their formidable tanks,

  Also to walk so easily under desert skies

  That the mother of some young Sunni

  Will see a marine in the dusty streets

  And turn to the daughter-in-law beside her

  And say with a shudder: Pray God our boy

  Doesn’t stir up that Roman animal

  Whom a cruel rage for blood would drive

  Straight to the middle of any slaughter.

  It is sweet, and fit, to die for one ’s country,

  Especially since death doesn’t spare deserters

  or the young man without a warrior’s instincts

  Who goes down with a bullet in his back.

  Civic courage is a more complicated matter.

  of itself it shines out undefiled.

  It neither lies its way into office, nor mistakes

  The interests of Roman oil for Roman honor.

  The kind of courage death can’t claim

  Doesn’t go very far in politics.

  If you are going to speak truth in public places

  You may as well take wing from the earth.

  Knowing when not to speak also has its virtue.

  I wouldn’t sit under the same roof beams

  With most of the explainers of wars on television

  or set sail on the same sleek ship.

  They say the gods have been known

  To punish the innocent along with the guilty

  And nemesis often finds the ones it means,

  With its limping gait, to track down.

  3.

  ODES, 3.19 QUANTEM DISTET AB INACHO

  You talk very well about Inachus

  And how Codrus died for his city,

  And the offspring of old Aeacus

  And the fighting at sacred Ilium under the walls,

  But on the price of Chian wine,

  And the question of who’s going to warm it,

  Under whose roof it will be drunk,

  And when my bones will come unfrozen, you are mute.

  Boy, let’s drink to the new moon’s sliver,

  And drink to the middle of the night, and drink

  To good Murena, with three glasses

  or with nine. Nine, says the madman poet

  Whom the uneven-numbered Muses love.

  Three, says the even-tempered Grace who holds

  Her naked sisters by the hands

  And disapproves altogether of brawling,

  Should do a party handsomely.

  But what I want’s to rave. Why is the flute

  From Phrygia silent? Why are the lyre

  And the reed pipe hanging on the wall?

  oh, how I hate a pinching hand.

  Scatter the roses! Let jealous old Lycus

  Listen to our pandemonium,

  And also the pretty neighbor he ’s not up to.

  Rhoda loves your locks, Telephus.

  She thinks they glisten like the evening star.

  As for me, I’m stuck on Glycera:

  With a love that smoulders
in me like slow fire.

  STATE OF THE PLANET

  On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Lamont-Doherty

  Earth Observatory

  1.

  October on the planet at the century’s end.

  Rain lashing the windshield. Through blurred glass

  Gusts of a Pacific storm rocking a huge, shank-needled

  Himalayan cedar. Under it a Japanese plum

  Throws off a vertical cascade of leaves the color

  of skinned copper, if copper could be skinned.

  And under it, her gait as elegant and supple

  As the young of any of earth’s species, a schoolgirl

  Negotiates a crosswalk in the wind, her hair flying,

  The red satchel on her quite straight back darkening

  Splotch by smoky crimson splotch as the rain pelts it.

  one of the six billion of her hungry and curious kind.

  Inside the backpack, dog-eared, full of illustrations,

  A book with a title like Getting to Know Your Planet.

  The book will tell her that the earth this month

  Has yawed a little distance from the sun,

  And that the air, cooling, has begun to move,

  As sensitive to temperature as skin is

  To a lover’s touch. It will also tell her that the air—

  It’s likely to say “the troposphere”—has trapped

  Emissions from millions of cars, idling like mine

  As she crosses, and is making a greenhouse

  of the atmosphere. The book will say that climate