The Apple Trees at Olema (7 page)

The lovers loitered on the deck talking,

the men who were with men and the men who were with new women,

a little shrill and electric, and the wifely women

who had repose and beautifully lined faces

and coppery skin. She had taken the turkey from the oven

and her friends were talking on the deck

in the steady sunshine. She imagined them

drifting toward the food, in small groups, finishing

sentences, lifting a pickle or a sliver of turkey,

nibbling a little with unconscious pleasure. And

she imagined setting it out artfully, the white meat,

the breads, antipasti, the mushrooms and salad

arranged down the oak counter cleanly, and how they all came

as in a dance when she called them. She carved meat

and then she was crying. Then she was in darkness

crying. She didn't know what she wanted.

Roads to the north of here are dry.

First red buds prick out the lethal spring

and corncrakes, swarming, lower in clouds

above the fields from Paris to Béziers.

This is God's harvest: the village boy

whose tongue was sliced in two,

the village crones slashing cartilage

at the knees to crawl to Carcassonne.

—If the world were not evil in itself,

the blessed one said, then every choice

would not constitute a loss.

This sickness of this age is flesh,

he said. Therefore we build with stone.

The dead with their black lips are heaped

on one another, intimate as lovers.

The floor hurts so much it whines

whichever way they step,

as if it had learned the trick

of suffering.

Poor floor.

This is the garden of delight,

a man pointing at a woman

and a bird perched

on a cylinder of crystal

watching. She has a stopper

in her mouth or the paint

has blistered, long ago, just there.

He looks worried, but not terrified,

not terrified, and he doesn't move.

It's an advantage of paintings.

You don't have to.

I used to name the flowers—

beard tongue, stonecrop,

pearly everlasting.

I.

Art & love: he camps outside my door,

innocent, carnivorous. As if desire

were actually a flute, as if the little song

transcend, transcend
could get you anywhere.

He brings me wine; he believes in the arts

and uses them for beauty. He brings me

vinegar in small earthen pots, postcards

of the hillsides by Cézanne desire has left

alone, empty farms in August and the vague

tall chestnut trees at Jas de Bouffan, fetal

sandstone rifted with mica from the beach.

He brings his body, wolfish, frail,

all brown for summer like croissant crusts

at La Seine in the Marina, the bellies

of pelicans I watched among white dunes

under Pico Blanco on the Big Sur coast.

It sickens me, this glut & desperation.

II.

Walking the Five Springs trail, I tried to think.

Dead-nettle, thimbleberry. The fog heaved in

between the pines, violet sparrows made curves

like bodies in the ruined air.
All women

are masochists
. I was so young, believing

every word they said.
Dürer is second-rate
.

Dürer's Eve feeds her apple to the snake;

snaky tresses, cat at her feet, at Adam's foot

a mouse. Male fear, male eyes and art. The art

of love, the eyes I use to see myself

in love. Ingres, pillows. I think the erotic

is not sexual, only when you're lucky.

That's where the path forks. It's not the riddle

of desire that interests me; it is the riddle

of good hands, chervil in a windowbox,

the white pages of a book, someone says

I'm tired, someone turning on the light.

III.

Streaked in the window, the city wavers

but the sky is empty, clean. Emptiness

is strict; that pleases me. I do cry out.

Like everyone else, I thrash, am splayed.

oh, oh, oh, oh. Eyes full of wonder.

Guernica. Ulysses on the beach. I see

my body is his prayer. I see my body.

Walking in the galleries at the Louvre,

I was, each moment, naked & possessed.

Tourists gorged on goosenecked Florentine girls

by Pollaiuolo. He sees me like a painter.

I hear his words for me: white, gold.

I'd rather walk the city in the rain.

Dog shit, traffic accidents. Whatever god

there is dismembered in his Chevy.

A different order of religious awe:

agony & meat, everything plain afterward.

IV.

Santa Lucia: eyes jellied on a plate.

The thrust of serpentine was almost green

all through the mountains where the rock cropped out.

I liked sundowns, dusks smelling of madrone,

the wildflowers, which were not beautiful,

fierce little wills rooting in the yellow

grass year after year, thirst in the roots,

mineral. They have intelligence

of hunger. Poppies lean to the morning sun,

lupine grows thick in the rockface, self-heal

at creekside. He wants to fuck. Sweet word.

All suction. I want less. Not that I fear

the huge dark of sex, the sharp sweet light,

light if it were water raveling, rancor,

tenderness like rain. What I want happens

not when the deer freezes in the shade

and looks at you and you hold very still

and meet her gaze but in the moment after

when she flicks her ears & starts to feed again.

I've watched memory wound you.

I felt nothing but envy.

Having slept in wet meadows,

I was not through desiring.

Imagine January and the beach,

a bleached sky, gulls. And

look seaward: what is not there

is there, isn't it, the huge

bird of the first light

arched above first waters

beyond our touching or intention

or the reasonable shore.

She is first seen dancing which is a figure

not for art or prayer or the arousal of desire

but for action simply; her breastband is copper,

her crown imitates the city walls. Though she draws us

to her, like a harbor or a river mouth she sends us away.

A figure of the outward. So the old men grown lazy

in patrician ways lay out cash for adventures.

Imagining a rich return, they buy futures

and their slaves haunt the waterfront for news of ships.

The young come from the villages dreaming.

Pleasure and power draw them. They are employed

to make inventories and grow very clever,

multiplying in their heads, deft at the use of letters.

When they are bored, they write down old songs from the villages,

and the cleverest make new songs in the old forms

describing the pleasures of the city, their mistresses,

old shepherds and simpler times. And the temple

where the farmer grandfathers of the great merchants worshipped,

the dim temple across from the marketplace

which was once a stone altar in a clearing in the forest,

where the nightwatch pisses now against a column in the moonlight,

is holy to them; the wheat mother their goddess of sweaty sheets,

of what is left in the air when that glimpsed beauty

turns the corner, of love 's punishment and the wracking

of desire. They make songs about that. They tell

stories of heroes and brilliant lust among the gods.

These are amusements. She dances, the ships go forth,

slaves and peasants labor in the fields, maimed soldiers

ape monkeys for coins outside the wineshops,

the craftsmen work in bronze and gold, accounts

are kept carefully, what goes out, what returns.

Lead skies

and gothic traceries of poplar.

In the sacrament of winter

Savonarola raged against the carnal word.

Inside the prism of that eloquence

even Botticelli renounced the bestial gods

and beauty.

Florentine vanity

gathers in the dogwood buds.

How sexual

this morning is the otherwise

quite plain

white-crowned sparrow's

plumed head!

By a natural

selection, the word

originates its species,

the blood flowers,

republics scrawl their hurried declarations

& small birds scavenge

in the chaste late winter grass.

The shadows of late afternoon and the odors

of honeysuckle are a congruent sadness.

Everything is easy but wrong. I am walking

across thick lawns under maples in borrowed tennis whites.

It is like the photographs of Randall Jarrell

I stared at on the backs of books in college.

He looked so sad and relaxed in the pictures.

He was translating Chekhov and wore tennis whites.

It puzzled me that in his art, like Chekhov's,

everyone was lost, that the main chance was never seized

because it is only there as a thing to be dreamed of

or because someone somewhere had set the old words

to the old tune: we live by habit and it doesn't hurt.

Now the
thwack
…
thwack
of tennis balls being hit

reaches me and it is the first sound of an ax

in the cherry orchard or the sound of machine guns

where the young terrorists are exploding

among poor people on the streets of Los Angeles.

I begin making resolutions: to take risks, not to stay

in the south, to somehow do honor to Randall Jarrell,

never to kill myself. Through the oaks I see the courts,

the nets, the painted boundaries, and the people in tennis

whites who look so graceful from this distance.

Snow is falling

on the age of reason, on Tom Jefferson's

little hill & on the age of sensibility.

Jane Austen isn't walking in the park,

she considers that this gray crust

of an horizon will not do;

she is by the fire, reading William Cowper,

and Jefferson, if he isn't dead,

has gone down to Kmart

to browse among the gadgets:

pulleys, levers, the separation of powers.

I try to think of history: the mammoth

jawbone in the entry hall,

Napoléon in marble,

Meriwether Lewis dead at Grinder's Trace.

I don't want the powers separated,

one wing for Governor Randolph when he comes,

the other wing for love,

private places

in the public weal

that ache against the teeth like ice.

outside this monument, the snow

catches, star-shaped,

in the vaginal leaves of old magnolias.

(For Louise)

Patient cultivation,

as the white petals of

the climbing rose

were to some man

a lifetime's careful work,

the mess of petals

on the lawn was bred

to fall there as a dog

is bred to stand—

gardens are a history

of art, this fin de siècle

flower & Dobermann's

pinscher, all deadly

sleekness in the neighbor's

yard, were born,
brennende

liebe
, under the lindens

that bear the morning

toward us on a silver tray.

Horse is Lorca's word, fierce as wind,

or melancholy, gorgeous, Andalusian:

white horse grazing near the river dust;

and parsnip is hopeless,

second cousin to the rhubarb

which is already second cousin

to an apple pie. Marrying the words

to the coarse white umbels sprouting

on the first of May is history

but conveys nothing; it is not the veined

body of Queen Anne's lace

I found, bored, in a spring classroom

from which I walked hands tingling

for the breasts that are meadows in New Jersey

in 1933; it is thick, shaggier, and the name

is absurd. It speaks of durable

unimaginative pleasures: reading Balzac,

fixing the window sash, rising

to a clean kitchen, the fact

that the car starts & driving to work

through hills where the roadside thickens

with the green ungainly stalks,

the bracts and bright white flowerets

of horse-parsnips.