The Apple Trees at Olema (20 page)

Transcribed and translated from a manuscript in her hand, at Diego

Rivera's studio near the Hacienda San Angel in Mexico City

1.

¿De quien son las piedras del rio

que ven tus ojos, habitante?

Tiene un espejo la mañana.

2.

Jodhpurs
: from a state in northeast India,

for the riding breeches of the polo-playing English.

Dhoti
: once the dress of the despised,

it is practically a symbol of folk India.

One thinks of blood flowering in Gandhi's

after the zealot shot him.

Were one, therefore, to come across a child's primer

a rainy late winter afternoon in a used bookshop

in Hyde Park and notice, in fine script,

fading, on the title page,

“Susanna Mansergh, The Lodge, Little Shelford, Cmbs.”

and underneath it, a fairly recent ballpoint

in an adult hand:
Anna Sepulveda Garcia
—
sua libra

and flip through pages which asseverate,

in captions enhanced by lively illustrations,

that
Jane wears jodhpurs
, while
Derek wears a dhoti
,

it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume a political implication,

lost, perhaps, on the children of Salvadoran refugees

studying English in a housing project in Chicago.

3.

Ode: not connected, historically, to
odor
or to
odd
.

To
mad
, though obsolete, meant “to behave insanely”

and is quite another thing than to
madden
,

meaning, of course, “to irritate.”

So that the melancholy Oxford cleric who wished to live

“Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife”

and gave Thomas Hardy the title for that novel

was merely observing that people in large numbers

living at close quarters act crazy

and are best given a wide berth.

Not an option, perhaps,

for a former high school math teacher

from San Salvador whose sister, a secretary in the diocesan office

of the Christian Labor Movement, was found

in an alley with her neck broken, and who therefore

followed her elder brother to Chicago and, perhaps,

bought a child's alphabet book in a used bookstore

near the lake where it had languished for thirty years

since the wife, perhaps, of an Irish professor of Commonwealth History

at the university had sold it in 1959—maybe the child died

of some childhood cancer—maybe she outgrew the primer

and when her bookshelf began to fill with more grown-up books,

The Wind in the Willows
,
Winnie-the-Pooh
—

what privilege those titles suddenly call up!—

her father, famous for his groundbreaking
Cold War and Commonwealth

of 1948, looking antique now on the miscellaneous shelf

beside row on row of James T. Farrell, sold it. Or perhaps his wife

did and found it painful to let her daughter's childhood go,

was depressed after. Probably she hated Chicago anyway.

And, browsing, embittered, among the volumes on American history

she somehow felt she should be reading,

thought
Wisconsin
,
Chicago
: they killed them

and took their language and then they used it

to name the places that they've taken.

Perhaps the marriage survived. Back in London

she may have started graduate school in German Lit.

“Be ahead of all partings,” Rilke said in the Spender translation.

Perhaps she was one of those lives—if the child did die

of the sickness I chose to imagine—in which death

inscribes a permanent before and after. Perhaps

she was one of those whose story is innocence

and a private wound and aftermath.

4.

-Math
, as it turned out,

when she looked up the etymology

comes from an Anglo-Saxon word for mowing.

Maeth
. It would have been the era

of “hot skirts” and The Rolling Stones.

And she a little old to enjoy it. Standing on Chelsea Embankment

after the Duncan Grant retrospective at the Tate,

thinking about the use of
du
in the
Duino Elegies

or about the photo in the
Times
that morning

of the Buddhist monk in Saigon, wearing something

like a dhoti, immobile, sheathed in flames.

5.

There are those who think it's in fairly bad taste

to make habitual reference to social and political problems

in poems. To these people it seems a form of melodrama

or self-aggrandizement, which it no doubt partly is.

And there's no doubt either that these same people also tend

to feel that it ruins a perfectly good party

to be constantly making reference to the poor or oppressed

and their misfortunes in poems which don't,

after all, lift a finger to help them. Please

help yourself to the curried chicken.

What is the etymology of
curry
? Of
chicken
?

Wouldn't you like just another splash of chardonnay?

There's far less objection, generally speaking,

you will find yourself less
at loggerheads

with the critics, by making mention of accidental death,

which might happen to any of us, which does not,

therefore, seem like moral nagging, and which is also,

in our way of seeing things, possibly tragic

and possibly absurd—“Helen Mansergh was thinking about Rilke's

pronouns

which may be why she never saw the taxi”—and thus

a subject much easier to ironize.

She—the mother from Salvador—may have bought several books.

Mother Goose
,
Goodnight Moon
. All

relatively cheap. And that night her brother might have come

with a bag of groceries. And—a gesture against sleet and ice—

flowers in January!

And the Salvadoran paper from Miami.

6.

Disaster: something wrong with the stars.

Loggerheads: heavy brass balls attached to long sticks;

they were heated on shipboard and plunged into buckets of tar

to soften it for use. By synecdoche were sailors tars.

And from the rage of living together in brutish conditions

on a ship the tars were often at loggerheads. You could crush

a man's knees with them easily. One swing. Claim

it was an accident. If the buggers didn't believe you,

the punishment was some number of lashes with a whip. Not death.

That was the punishment for sodomy, or striking an officer.

7.

“As when the Sun

in dim eclipse disastrous twilight sheds…”

Mount Diablo foothills, green in the early spring.

Creeks running, scent of bay leaves in the air.

And we heard a high two-note whistle: once,

twice, and then again with a high vibrato tailing.

“What's that?” “Loggerhead shrike.”

(Years later one of the young poets at Iowa, impatient

with her ornithologist boyfriend, his naming

everything to death, her thinking
bird
,
bird!
)

8.

Imagine (from the Latin,
imago,
a likeness)

a language (also from Latin,
lingua,
the tongue)

purged (
purgo
, to cleanse) of history (not the Greek
hist

for tissue, but the Greek
historia
,

to learn by inquiry). Not this net of circumstance

(
circum
, etc.) that we are caught in,

ill-starred, quarried with veins of cruelty,

stupidity, bad luck,

which rhymes with
fuck
,

not the sweet act, the exclamation

of disgust, or maybe both

a little singing ode-like rhyme

because we live our lives in language and in time,

craving some pure idiomorphic dialect of the thing itself,

Adamic, electrified by clear tension

like the distance between a sparrow and a cat,

self and thing and eros as a god of wonder:

it sat upon a branch and sang: the bird.

9.

In one of Hardy's poems, a man named “Drummer Hodge,”

born in Lincolnshire where the country word

for twilight was
dimpsy
two centuries ago,

was a soldier buried in South Africa.

Some war that had nothing to do with him.

Face up according to the custom of his people

so that Hardy could imagine him gazing forever

into foreign constellations.
Cyn
was the Danish word

for farm. Hence Hodge's cyn.

And someone of that stock studied medicine.

Hence Hodgkin's lymphoma.
Lymph
from the Latin

meant once “a pure clear spring of water.”

Hence
limpid
. But it came to mean

the white cells of the blood.

“His homely Northern breast and brain

    Grow to some Southern tree

And strange-eyed constellations reign

    His stars eternally.”

10.

I have been hearing it all morning

As if it were a Spanish nonsense rhyme.

Like the poem of José Martí the woman in Chicago

might have sung to her children as they fell asleep:

Yo soy un hombre sincero

De donde crece la palma,

Y antes de morime quiero

Echar mis versos del alma.

Do you hear it? She has (strong beat) a Hodg (strong beat)

kin's lym-phom (strong beat)-a.

This impure spring of language, strange-eyed,

“To scatter the verses of the soul.”

11.

So—what are the river stones

that come swimming to your eyes,
habitante
?

They hold the hope of morning.

It was the seventh night and he walked out to look at stars.

Chill in the air, sharp, not of summer, and he wondered

if the geese on the lake felt it and grew restless

and if that was why, in the later afternoon, they had gathered

at the bay's mouth and flown abruptly back and forth,

back and forth on the easy, swift veering of their wings.

It was high summer and he was thinking of autumn,

under a shadowy tall pine, and of geese overhead on cold mornings

and high clouds drifting. He regarded the stars in the cold dark.

They were a long way off, and he decided, watching them blink,

that compared to the distance between him and them,

the outside-looking-in feeling was dancing cheek-to-cheek.

And noticed then that she was there, a shadow between parked cars,

looking out across the valley where the half-moon poured thin light

down the pine ridge. She started when he approached her,

and then recognized him, and smiled, and said, “Hi, night light.”

And he said, “Hi, dreamer.” And she said, “Hi, moonshine,”

and he said, “Hi, mortal splendor.” And she said, “That's good.”

She thought for a while. Scent of sage or yerba buena

and the singing in the house. She took a new tack and said,

“My father is a sad chair and I am the blind thumb's yearning.”

He said, “Who threw the jade swan in the chicken soup?”

Some of the others were coming out of the house, saying good-bye,

hugging each other. She said, “The lion of grief paws

what meat she is given.” Cars starting up, one of the stagehands

struggling to uproot the pine. He said, “Rifling the purse

of possible regrets.” She said, “Staggering tarts, a narcoleptic moon.”

Most of the others were gone. A few gathered to listen.

The stagehands were lugging off the understory plants.

Two others were rolling up the mountain. It was clear that,

though polite, they were impatient. He said, “Good-bye, last thing.”

She said, “So long, apocalypse.” Someone else said, “Time,”

but she said, “The last boat left Xania in late afternoon.”

He said, “Good-bye, Moscow, nights like sable,

mornings like the word
persimmon
.” She said,

“Day's mailman drinks from a black well of reheated coffee

in a café called Mom's on the outskirts of Durango.” He said,

“That's good.” And one of the stagehands stubbed

his cigarette and said, “OK, would the last of you folks to leave,

if you can remember it, just put out the stars?” which they did,

and the white light everywhere in that silence was white paper.