The Apple Trees at Olema

by Robert Hass

  The most competent of men, had served in the infantry

  In the Meuse-Argonne—brings me, in the dream,

  To tears. There is a view onto a garden from the upper room

  Where he stands with his back pinned to the wall.

  He has begun to weep, his shoulders shaking.

  Now, outside the dream, I remember overhearing

  Him describe the battle of–was it Belleau Wood?—

  The Argonne forest??—as a butcher shop, also in his dry,

  Slightly barking voice, and then he put down a card,

  My parents and my aunt and he played bridge—

  And said, “A very smoky butcher shop.” Now,

  Not in the dream, an image of the small cut glass dish

  Into which my aunt put small festively colored candies

  That were called “a bridge mix.” And the memory

  of a taste like anise, like a California summer.

  Though I don’t know how I know it, I know

  That there had been a long and lavish party

  on the lawn outside which resembles, oddly,

  The Luxembourg Gardens and, somewhere

  In the dream, I notice, to my surprise, a bird,

  Brilliantly yellow, a European goldfinch, perhaps,

  Red in the wing tips, high up among the leaves

  of an espaliered pear tree, on which each of the pears

  Has been wrapped in a translucent paper packet.

  I experience my interest in the bird as irresponsible.

  My uncle is holding my hand very tightly and I

  Lean just a little to the left to see the bird more clearly—

  I think it is red on the wing tips—-and from that angle

  I can see the child’s body slumped under the pear tree,

  And think, “Well, that explains his panic,” and,

  When I look again, the bird, of course, has flown.

  THE DRY MOUNTAIN AIR

  our Grandma Dahling arrived from the train station

  In a limousine: an old Lincoln touring car

  With immense, black, shiny, rounded fenders

  And a silver ornament of Nike on the hood.

  She wore a long black coat and pearl-gray gloves.

  White hair, very soft white, and carefully curled.

  Also rimless glasses with thin gold frames.

  once in the house, having presented ourselves

  To be hugged completely, the important thing

  Was to watch her take off her large, black,

  Squarish, thatched, and feathered confection of a hat.

  She raised both hands above her head, elbows akimbo,

  Lifting the black scrim of a veil in the process,

  Removed a pin from either side, and lifted it,

  Gingerly, straight up, as if it were a saucer of water

  That I must not spill, and then she set it down,

  Carefully, solicitously even, as if it were a nest

  of fledgling birds (which it somewhat resembled),

  And then there arrived, after she had looked at the hat

  For a moment to see that it wasn’t going to move,

  The important thing. Well, she would say, well, now,

  In a musical German-inflected English, touching together

  Her two soft, white, ungloved hands from which emanated

  The slightly spiced, floral scent of some hand lotion

  That made the hands of great-grandmothers singularly soft,

  And regard us, and shake her head just a little, but for a while,

  To express her wonder at our palpable bodies before her,

  And then turn to her suitcase on the sea chest in the hall,

  Not having been transferred yet to her bedroom by my father

  Who had hauled it up the long, precipitous front stairs;

  She flipped open the brass clasps and the shield-shaped lock

  She had not locked and opened the case to a lavender interior

  From which rose the scent of chocolate, mingled faintly

  With the smell of anise from the Christmas cookies

  That she always baked. But first were the paper mats

  From the dining car of the California Zephyr, adorned

  With soft pastel images of what you might see

  From the vista Car: Grand Canyon, Mount Shasta,

  A slightly wrinkled Bridal veil Falls, and, serene, contemplative

  Almost, a view of Lake Louise, intimate to me because,

  Although it was Canadian, it bore my mother’s name.

  My brother and I each got two views. He, being the eldest,

  Always took Grand Canyon, which I found obscurely terrifying

  And so being second was always a relief. I took Lake Louise

  And he took Half Dome and the waterfall, and she looked surprised

  That we were down to one and handed me the brooding angel,

  Shasta. And then from under layers of shimmery print dresses,

  She produced, as if relieved that it wasn’t lost, the largest chocolate bar

  That either of us had ever seen. Wrapped in dignified brown paper,

  on which ceremonial, silvery capital letters must have announced—

  I couldn’t read—the sort of thing it was. These were the war years.

  Chocolate was rationed. The winey, dark scent rose like manna

  In the air and filled the room. My brother, four years older,

  Says this never happened. Not once. She never visited the house

  on Jackson Street with its sea air and the sound of foghorns

  At the Gate. I thought it might help to write it down here

  That the truth of things might be easier to come to

  on a quiet evening in the clear, dry, mountain air.

  FIRST THINGS AT THE LAST MINUTE

  The white-water rush of some warbler’s song.

  Last night, a few strewings of ransacked moonlight

  on the sheets. You don’t know what slumped forward

  In the nineteen-forties taxi or why they blamed you

  or what the altered landscape, willowy, riparian,

  Had to do with the reasons why everyone

  Should be giving things away, quickly,

  From a spendthrift sorrow that, because it can’t bear

  The need to be forgiven, keeps looking for something

  To forgive. The motion of washing machines

  Is called agitation. object constancy is a term

  Devised to indicate what a child requires

  From days. Clean sheets are an example

  of something that, under many circumstances,

  A person can control. The patterns moonlight makes

  Are chancier, and dreams, well, dreams

  Will have their way with you, their way

  With you, will have their way.

  POET’S WORK

  1.

  You carry a saucer of clear water,

  Smelling faintly of lemon, that spills

  Into the dark roots of what

  Was I saying? Hurt or dance, the stunned

  Hours, arguments for and against:

  There’s a tap here somewhere.

  2.

  This dream: on white linen, in the high ceiling’d room,

  Marie and Julia had spread baskets of focaccia,

&n
bsp; A steaming zucchini torte, ham in thin, almost deliquescent slices,

  Mottled ovals of salami, around a huge bowl in which chunks of crabmeat,

  With its sweet, iodine smell of high tide, were strewn

  Among quarter moons of sun-colored tomatoes and lettuce leaves

  of some species as tender-looking as the child’s death had been.

  3.

  If there is a way in, it may be

  Through the corolla of the cinquefoil

  With its pale yellow petals,

  In the mixed smell of dust and water

  At trailside in the middle reaches of July.

  Soft: an almost phospher gleam in twilight.

  MOUTH SLIGHTLY OPEN

  The body a yellow brilliance and a head

  Some orange color from a Chinese painting

  Dipped in sunset by the summer gods

  Who are also producing that twitchy shiver

  In the cottonwoods, less wind than river,

  Where the bird you thought you saw

  Was, whether you believe what you thought

  You saw or not, and then was not, had

  Absconded, leaving behind the emptiness

  That hums a little in you now, and is not bad

  or sad, and only just resembles awe or fear.

  The bird is elsewhere now, and you are here.

  OLD MOVIE WITH THE SOUND TURNED OFF

  The hatcheck girl wears a gown that glows;

  The cigarette girl in the black fishnet stockings

  And a skirt of black, gauzy, bunched-up tulle

  That bobs above the pert muffin of her bottom,

  She must be twenty-two, would look like a dancer

  In Degas except for the tray of cigarettes that rests

  Against her—tummy might have been the decade ’s word,

  And the thin black strap which binds it to her neck

  And makes the whiteness of her skin seem swan’s-down

  White. Some quality in the film stock that they used

  Made everything so shiny that the films could not

  Not make the whole world look like lingerie, like

  Phosphorescent milk with winking shadows in it.

  All over the world the working poor put down their coins,

  Poured into theaters on Friday nights. The manager raffled—

  “Raffled off,” we used to say in San Rafael in my postwar

  Childhood into which the custom had persisted—

  Sets of dishes in the intermission of the double feature—

  of the kind they called Fiestaware. And now

  The gangster has come in, surrounded by an entourage

  of prizefighters and character actors, all in tuxedos

  And black overcoats—except for him. His coat is camel

  (Was it the material or the color?—my mind wanders

  To earth-colored villages in Samara or Afghanistan).

  He is also wearing a white scarf which seems to shimmer

  As he takes it off, after he takes off the gray fedora

  And hands it to the hatcheck girl. The singer,

  In a gown of black taffeta that throws off light

  In starbursts, wears black gloves to her elbows

  And as she sings, you sense she is afraid.

  Not only have I seen this film before—the singer

  Shoots the gangster just when he thinks he ’s been delivered

  From a nemesis involving his brother, the district attorney,

  And a rival mob—I know the grandson of the cigarette girl,

  Who became a screenwriter and was blackballed later

  Because she raised money for the Spanish Civil War.

  or at least that’s the story as I remember it, so that,

  When the gangster is clutching his wounded gut

  And delivering a last soundless quip and his scarf

  Is still looking like the linen in Heaven, I realize

  That it is for them a working day and that the dead

  will rise uncorrupted and change into flannel slacks,

  Hawaiian shirts; the women will put on summer smocks

  Made from the material superior dish towels are made of

  Now, and they’ll all drive up to Malibu for drinks.

  All the dead actors were pretty in their day. Why

  Am I watching this movie? you may ask. Well, my beloved,

  Down the hall, is probably laboring over a poem

  And is not to be disturbed. And look! I have rediscovered

  The sweetness and the immortality of art. The actress

  Wrote under a pseudonym, died, I think, of cancer of the lungs.

  So many of them did. Far better for me to be doing this

  (A last lurid patch of fog out of which the phrase “The End”

  Comes swimming; the music I can’t hear surging now

  Like fate) than reading with actual attention my field guides

  Which inform me that the flower of the incense cedar I saw

  This morning by the creek is “unisexual, solitary, and terminal.”

  EZRA POUND’S PROPOSITION

  Beauty is sexual, and sexuality

  Is the fertility of the earth and the fertility

  of the earth is economics. Though he is no recommendation

  For poets on the subject of finance,

  I thought of him in the thick heat

  of the Bangkok night. Not more than fourteen, she saunters up to you

  outside the Shangri-la Hotel

  And says, in plausible English,

  “How about a party, big guy?”

  Here is more or less how it works:

  The World Bank arranges the credit and the dam

  Floods three hundred villages, and the villagers find their way

  To the city where their daughters melt into the teeming streets,

  And the dam’s great turbines, beautifully tooled

  In Lund or Dresden or Detroit, financed

  By Lazard Frères in Paris or the Morgan Bank in New York,

  Enabled by judicious gifts from Bechtel of San Francisco

  or Halliburton of Houston to the local political elite,

  Spun by the force of rushing water,

  Have become hives of shimmering silver

  And, down river, they throw that bluish throb of light

  Across her cheekbones and her lovely skin.

  ON VISITING THE DMZ AT PANMUNJON: A HAIBUN

  The human imagination does not do very well with large numbers. More than two and a half million people died during the Korean War. It seems that it ought to have taken more time to wreck so many bodies. Five hundred thousand Chinese soldiers died in battle, or of disease. A million South Koreans died, four fifths of them civilians. One million one hundred thousand North Koreans. The terms are inexact and thinking about them can make you sleepy. Not all “South Koreans” were born in the south of Korea; some were born in the north and went south, for reasons of family, or religion, or politics, at the time of the division of the country. Likewise the “North Koreans.” During the war one half of all the houses in the country were destroyed and almost all industrial and public buildings. Pyongyang was bombarded with one thousand bombs per square kilometer in a city that had been the home to four hundred thousand people. Twenty-six thousand American soldiers died in the war. There is no evidence that human beings have absorbed these fac
ts, which ought, at least, to provoke some communal sense of shame. It may be the sheer number of bodies that is hard to hold in mind. That is perhaps why I felt a slight onset of nausea as we were moved from the civilian bus to the military bus at Panmunjon. The young soldiers had been trained to do their jobs and they carried out the transfer of our bodies, dressed for summer in the May heat, with a precision and dispatch that seemed slightly theatrical. They were young men. They wanted to be admired. I found it very hard to describe to myself what I felt about them, whom we had made our instrument.

  The flurry of white between the guard towers

  —river mist? a wedding party?

  is cattle egrets nesting in the willows.

  CONSCIOUSNESS

  First image is blue sky, nothing in it, and not understood as sky, a field of blue.

  The second image is auditory: the moan of a foghorn.

  We had been arguing about the nature of consciousness, or avoiding arguing, talking.

  Dean had read a book that said that consciousness was like a knock-knock joke, some notion of an answering call having brought it into being which was, finally, itself anticipating an answer from itself, echo of an echo of an echo.

  My mind went seven places at once.

  One place was a line of ridge somewhere in a dry Western landscape just after sundown, I saw a pair of coyotes appear suddenly on the ridge edge and come to a loping stop and sniff the air and look down toward a valley in the moonlight, tongues out in that way that looks to us like happiness, though it isn’t necessarily; I suppose they were an idea of mammal consciousness come over the event horizon in some pure form, hunter-attention, life-in-the-body attention.

  CD said human consciousness shows up in the record as symbolic behavior toward the dead.

  My mind also went to Whitman, not interested, he said, in the people who need to say that we all die and life is a suck and a sell and two plus two is four and nothing left over.

  I think I respond with such quick hostility to anything that smells like reductionist materialism because it was my father’s worldview.