by Robert Hass
“Bobby,” he was sitting in a chair on the porch of the old house on D Street, “it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there.” I was drawing with crayons on the stairs. Across the street the Haleys’ collie Butch was humping the McLaughlins’ collie Amanda on the Mullens’ front lawn, their coats shuddering like a wheat field in August.
Those stairs: there were five of them. I took three in a leap, coming home from school, and then four, and one day five, and have complicated feelings about the fact that it was one of the vivid pleasures of my life.
When I came into the room where he was dying of cancer, my father gave me a look that was pure plea and I felt a flaring of anger. What was I supposed to do? He was supposed to teach me how to die.
And a few minutes later when he was dead, I felt such a mix of love and anger and dismay and relief at the sudden peacefulness of his face that I wanted to whack him on the head with his polished walnut walking stick which was standing against the wall in a corner like the still mobile part of him.
My mind also went to Paris, steam on summer mornings rising off the streets the municipal workers had watered down at the corner of rue de l'Ecole Médicine and rue Dupuytren, I suppose because that city is a product, among other things, of human consciousness, and whatever else it is, it isn’t a knock-knock joke.
My grandmother used to say what a good baby I was, that they would put me in a crib on the roof of the house on Jackson Street in the sunlight and the smell of sea air from the Golden Gate and that I never cried; they’d check to see if I was sleeping and I wasn’t; my eyes would be wide open, I seemed to be content to lie there looking at the sky.
So I think that first image of consciousness in my consciousness is not the memory of a visual perception but the invention of the image of a visual perception—the picture of a field of pure blue—that came into my head when my grandmother told me that story.
Outside the sound of summer construction starting up. From my window I see a chickaree come out of the dry grasses, pale gold in the early morning light, and raise little puffs of dust as it bounds across the road, going somewhere, going about its chickaree business, which at this season must be mostly provision.
It was years before I understood that my father was telling his young son that he hated the job he had to go to every day.
It’s hard to see what you’re seeing with, to see what being is as an activity through the instrument of whatever-it-is we have being in.
Consciousness, “that means nothing,” Czeslaw wrote. “That loves itself,” George Oppen wrote. My poor father.
EXIT, PURSUED BY A SIERRA MEADOW
That slow, rhythmic flickering of the wings,
As if from the ache of pleasure—
A California tortoiseshell
Fastened to the white umbel of a milkweed stalk.
Smell of water in the dry air,
The almost nutmeg smell of dust.
White fir, Jeffrey pine,
I have no way of knowing whether you prefer
Summer or winter,
Though I think you are more beautiful in winter.
Scarlet fritillary, corn lily,
I don’t know which you prefer, either.
So long, horsemint,
Your piebald mix of lavender and soft gray-green under the cottonwoods
on a shelf of lichened granite near a creek
May be the most startling thing in these mountains,
Besides the mountains.
It’s good that we stopped just a minute
To look at you and then walked down the trail
Because we had things to do
And because beauty is a little unendurable,
I mean, getting used to it is unendurable,
Because if we can’t eat a thing or do something with it,
Human beings get bored by almost everything eventually,
Which is why winter is such an admirable invention.
There’s another month of summer here.
August will squeeze the sweetness out of you
And drift it as pollen.
SEPTEMBER, INVERNESS
Tomales Bay is flat blue in the Indian summer heat.
This is the time when hikers on Inverness Ridge
Stand on tiptoe to pick ripe huckleberries
That the deer can’t reach. This is the season of lulls—
Egrets hunting in the tidal shallows, a ribbon
of sandpipers fluttering over mudflats, white,
Then not. A drift of mist wisping off the bay.
This is the moment when bliss is what you glimpse
From the corner of your eye, as you drive past
Running errands, and the wind comes up,
And the surface of the water glitters hard against it.
Notes and Acknowledgments
“Palo Alto: The Marshes”
Mariana Richardson was the daughter of William Richardson, a sailor from Liverpool who became the first harbormaster of San Francisco Bay and married the daughter of a Mexican officer at the Presidio. The story of John Frémont’s order to Kit Carson to execute Sr. Berryessa and the de Haro brothers can be found in a number of accounts of “the Bear Flag Revolt,” one of the earliest accounts of which is Josiah Royce’s California. There are also a number of accounts of the destruction of the Klamath fishing village of Dokdokwass near what is now the Oregon-California border. A recent one is by Hamilton Sides, Blood and Thunder, 2006. Frémont and Carson undertook the massacre and the burning of the village as revenge for attacks on their party. Historians have established that they attacked the Klamaths by mistake for harryings against them carried out by young men of a nearby Modoc tribe. I first read the story when the U.S. Army was doing the same thing to villages in Vietnam.
“Concerning the Afterlife, the Indians of Central California Had Only the Dimmest Notions”
The title is taken from a sentence in Hubert Bancroft’s History of California, 1889.
“Like Three Fair Branches From One Root Deriv’d”
A description of the three graces in The Faerie Queen. The book I was reading at the time, which seemed to help with the subjects of desire and beauty and sexuality, was Edgar Wind’s Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, 1968, a study of, among other things, the neo-Platonist symbolism in Pre-Raphaelite painting.
“Santa Lucia”
Santa Lucia is the name of the virgin saint and martyr to whom several early Christian legends are attached, and also the name of a mountain range on the central California coast. There is, in the Mission Santa Ynez near Santa Barbara, a Native American painting of a young Indian-looking St. Lucy offering her plucked-out eyes to the viewer on a small plate, something the legendary St. Lucy was said to have done to the Roman patrician who wished to force her into marriage.
“Rusia en 1931”
is the original title of a book about the Soviet Union published in Paris in 1931 by César Vallejo. The archbishop is the Reverend Oscar Romero. Since this poem was written, his assassination has been clearly linked to El Salvador’s right-wing death squads.
“Santa Lucia II”
See the note on “Santa Lucia.” I seem to have imagined the speaker as a woman professionally involved with art.
“Berkeley Eclogue”
The phrase “a century of clouds” is borrowed, of course, from Guillaume Apollinaire, but also from a book of stories with that title by Bruce Boone, published by Black Star Press.
“Dragonflies Mating”
Jaime de Angulo was a well-known folklorist and collector of native California myths and stories. I owe this story about him to my friend Malcom Margolin.
“Regalia for a Black Hat Dancer”
The shrine of the Buddha
of Sokkaram is situated on a mountaintop near Kyongju, forty miles inland from Pusan and the site of one of Korea’s oldest Buddhist monasteries.
“Jatun Sacha”
The title comes from the name of a biological study center in the Ecuadorian rain forest on the Rio Napo near the town of Tena. This poem is for my son Luke, who was working there.
“English: An Ode”
The lines in Spanish come from a poem by the Mexican poet Pura López Colomé in her book Un Cristal en Otro, Ediciones Toledo, Mexico City, 1989.
“The Seventh Night”
I borrowed the phrase “staggering tarts” from Mary Karr, with her permission.
“Art and Life”
Vermeer’s Woman Pouring Milk can be seen at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, but I have a distinct memory of having seen it in The Hague at the Mauritshuis Museum in 1976. Perhaps it was on loan. In any case, I have been faithful to my memory.
“I Am Your Waiter Tonight and My Name Is Dmitri”
Fyodor Dostoevsky mistakenly describes Grushenka—in the Constance Garnett translation—as a “brunette.” Alfred Nobel died in 1896. His German company Dynamitakiengesellschaft (DAG) and its subsidiaries, including the Nobel-Dynamite Trust Company in London, manufactured munitions, as did Bofors, the Swedish armaments company he owned until his death.
“A Poem”
“Leon Goure” See Frances Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam, Boston: Atlantic Little Brown, 1972, pp. 166–67.
“whole races/Of tropical birds” See The Air War in Indochina, ed. Raphael Littauer and Norman Uphoff, Air War Study Group, Cornell University, revised edition, Boston: Beacon Press, 1972, pp. 94–95, 256–60. Also, generally, Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing, translated by Linda Haverty Rugg, New York: The New Press, 2000.
Thanks to the editors of the many journals in which these poems have appeared over the years. Thanks to the Guggenheim, Lannan, Whiting, and MacArthur Foundations which, at different times, gave me the gift of time. And infinite thanks to my editor, Daniel Halpern.
About the Author
ROBERT HASS was born in San Francisco in 1941. He attended St. Mary’s College and Stanford University. His books of poetry include Time and Materials, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 and the National Book Award in 2008; Sun Under Wood, for which he received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1996; Human Wishes; Praise, for which he received the William Carlos Williams Award in 1979; and Field Guide, which was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets Series. Hass also worked with Czesław Miłosz to translate a dozen volumes of Miłosz’s poetry, including the book-length Treatise on Poetry and, most recently, A Second Space. His translations of the Japanese haiku masters have been collected in The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa. His books of essays include Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism in 1984, and Now and Then: The Poet’s Choice Columns, 1997–2000. From 1995 to 1997 he served as poet laureate of the United States. He lives in northern California with his wife, the poet Brenda Hillman, and teaches English at the University of California at Berkeley.
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ALSO BY ROBERT HASS
Time and Materials: Poems, 1997–2005
Field Guide
Praise
Human Wishes
Sun Under Wood
Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry
Now and Then: The Poet’s Choice Columns, 1997–2000
Poet’s Choice: Poems for Everyday Life
The Essential Haiku: Versions of Bashō, Buson, and Issa
Czeslaw Milosz, The Separate Notebooks (with the author, Robert Pinsky, and Renata Gorczynski)
Czeslaw Milosz, Unattainable Earth (with the author)
Czeslaw Milosz, Facing the River (with the author)
Czeslaw Milosz, Provinces (with the author)
Czeslaw Milosz, Road-side Dog (with the author)
Czeslaw Milosz, Treatise on Poetry (with the author)
Czeslaw Milosz, New and Collected Poems (with the author and various hands)
Czeslaw Milosz, Second Space: New Poems (with the author)
Rock and Hawk: A Selection of Shorter Poems by Robinson Jeffers
Tomas Tranströmer: Selected Poems, 1954–1986
Into the Garden: A Wedding Anthology (with Stephen Mitchell)
The Addison Street Anthology: Berkeley’s Poetry Walk (with Jessica Fisher)
Czeslaw Milosz, Selected Poems, 1931–2004
Credits
Jacket design by Laura Klynstra
Jacket images © The Natural History Museum / Alamy
Copyright
THE APPLE TREES AT OLEMA. Copyright © 2010 by Robert Hass. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
EPub Edition © February 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-198615-4
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