The Apple Trees at Olema (2 page)

and thought it would be shorter. I thought

that what would represent my feelings

would be the absence of metaphor.

But then, at the third line, I discovered

the three line stanza and that it was

going to be the second dignity. So

I imagine he is in one of those aluminium

cubicles I've seen in the movies,

dressed or not. I also imagine that,

if they undressed him, and perhaps washed

his body or gave it an alcohol rub

to disinfect it, that that was the job

of some emigrant from a hot, poor country.

Anyway, he is dressed in this stanza,

which mimics the terza rima of Dante's comedy

and is a form that Wallace Stevens liked

to use, and also my dear friend Robert.

And “seemed peaceful” is a kind of metaphor.

2.
Sudden and Grateful Memory of Mississippi John Hurt

Because I woke again thinking of my brother's body

and why anyone would care in some future

that poetry addresses how a body is transferred

from the medical examiner's office,

which is organized by local government

and issues a certificate establishing that the person

in question is in fact dead and names the cause

or causes, to the mortuary or cremation society,

most of which are privately owned businesses

and run for profit and until recently tended

to be family businesses with skills and decorums

passed from father to son, and often quite ethnically

specific, in a country like ours made from crossers

of borders, as if, in the intimacy of death,

some tribal shame or squeamishness or sense

of propriety asserted itself so that the Irish

buried the Irish and the Italians the Italians.

In the south in the early years of the last century

it was the one business in which a black person

could grow wealthy and pass on a trade

and a modicum of independence to his children.

I know this because Judith wrote a piece about it

for which she interviewed fourth-generation

African-American morticians in oakland

whose grandfathers and great-grandfathers

had buried the dead in cotton towns on the Delta

or along the Brazos River in Texas, passing on

to their children who had gone west an order

of doing things and symbolic forms of courtesy

for the bereaved and sequences of behavior

at wakes and funerals, so that, for example,

the eldest woman in the maternal line

entered the chapel first, and what prayers

were said in what order. During Prohibition

they even sold the white lightning to the men

who were allowed to slip outside and take a nip

and talk about the dead while the cries

and gospel-song-voiced contralto moans

of grief that could sound like curious elation

rose inside. Also the rules for burial or burning.

Griefs and rituals and inside them cosmologies.

And I thought of Mississippi John Hurt's

great song about Louis Collins and its terrible

tenderness which can't be reproduced here

because so much of it is in the picking

of the six-string guitar and in his sweet,

reedy old man's voice: “And when they heard

that Louis was dead,

all the women dressed in red.

Angels laid him away.

They laid him six feet under the clay.

Angels laid him away.”

3.

You can fall a long way in sunlight.

You can fall a long way in the rain.

The ones who don't take the old white horse

take the morning train.

When you go down

into the city of the dead

with its whitewashed walls and winding alleys

and avenues of autumnal lindens and the heavy bells

tolling by the sea, crowds

appear in all directions,

having left their benches and tiered plazas,

laying aside their occupations of reverie

and gossip and the memory of breathing—

at least in the most reliable stories,

which are the ones the poets tell—

to hear what scraps of news they can

from this world where the air is thin

at high altitudes and smells of pine

and of almost perfect density in the valleys

where trees on summer afternoons sometimes

throw violet shadows across sidewalks.

only the arborist in the park never stirs

for the new arrivals; he is not incurious,

but he has his work. It is he who decides

which limbs get lopped off

in the city of the dead.

You can fall a long way in sunlight.

You can fall a long way in the rain.

The ones who don't take the old white horse

take the evening train.

4.

Today his body is consigned to the flames

and I begin to understand why people

would want to carry a body to the river's edge

and build a platform of wood and burn it

in the wind and scatter the ashes in the river.

As if to say, take him, fire, take him, air,

and, river, take him. Downstream. Downstream.

Watch the ashes disappear in the fast water

or, in a small flaring of anger, turn away, walk back

toward the markets and the hum of life, not quite

saying to yourself
There, the hell with it, it's done.

I said to him once, when he'd gotten into some scrape

or other, “You know, you have the impulse control

of a ferret.” And he said, “Yeah? I don't know

what a ferret is, but I get greedy. I don't mean to,

but I get greedy.” An old grubber's beard, going gray,

a wheelchair, sweats, a street person's baseball cap.

“I've been thinking about Billie Holiday, you know

if she were around now, she 'd be nothing. You know

what I mean? Hip-hop? Never. She had to be born

at a time when they were writing the kind of songs

and people were listening to the kind of songs

she was great at singing.” And I would say,

“You just got evicted from your apartment,

you can't walk and you have no money, so

I don't want to talk to you about Billie Holiday

right now, okay.” And he would say, “You know,

I'm like Mom. I mean, she really had a genius

for denial, don't you think? And the thing is,

you know, she was a pretty happy person.”

And I would say, “She was not a happy person.

She was panicky, crippled by guilt at her drinking,

and she was evasive to herself about herself,

and so she couldn't actually connect with anybody,

and her only defense was to be chronically cheerful.”

And he would say, “Worse things than cheerful.”

Well, I am through with those arguments,

except in my head, and not through, I see, with the habit—

I thought this poem would end
downriver downriver—

of worrying about where you are and how you're doing.

A dune begins with an obstacle—a stone, a shrub, a log,

anything heavy enough to resist being moved by wind.

This obstacle forms a
wind shadow
on its leeward side,

making eddies in the currents, now fast, now slow, of the air,

exactly as a rock in a stream causes an eddy in the water.

Within the eddy the wind moves with less force and less velocity

than the airstreams on either side, creating what geologists call

the surface of discontinuity.
And it is here that the wind

tends to drop part of its load of sand. The sand particles,

which hop or bounce along the earth before the wind,

begin to accumulate,

creating a greater eddy in the air currents

and capturing still more sand.

It's thus a dune is formed.

viewed in cross section, sand dunes display a characteristic profile.

on the windward side the angle of ascent is low and gradual—

twenty to twenty-five degrees from the horizontal. on the leeward side

the slope is much steeper, usually about thirty-four degrees—

the angle of repose of sand and most other loose materials.

The steep side of the dune is called the
slip face

because of the slides

that occur as sand is driven up the windward side

and deposited on or just over the crest.

The weight of the crest

eventually becomes greater than can be supported by the sand beneath,

so the extra sand slumps down the slip face

and the whole dune

advances in the direction of the prevailing wind, until some obstacle

like a mountain intervenes.

This movement, this grand slow march

across the earth's surface, has an external counterpart in the scouring

movement of glaciers,

and an internal one in the movement of grief

which has something in it of the desert's bareness

and of its distances.

The freeway tracks the Han River, which flows

west out of the mountains we are heading toward.

This morning it is river-colored, gray-green,

streaked with muddy gold, and swift. August,

an overcast morning after rain, the sky one shade

of pearl and the sheen of the roadside puddles

is so empty it seems to steady the world

like the posture of zealous young monks.

When I sat in the square in Cuernavaca

outside the Church of the Conquistador,

wondering if Malinche had ever loved Cortés

and watching the streams of people go by

in their white shirts and blouses in the heat

and the brightly colored cellophane papers

in which small candies are wrapped and unwrapped

being blown about in the slight breeze,

what was all that racket in the trees?

Boat-tailed grackles and white-winged doves.

And in Houston in the park on a Sunday

among the dragon kites and soccer balls

and the families on picnics in the heat,

not far from the Chapel of the Sacred Heart

where Rothko had made that solemnity

of stained glass windows for the suffering god

in cardinal red and a sorrowing blue,

what was louder than all the transistor radios?

The hip-hop and mariachi? What was that racket in the trees?

Boat-tailed grackles and white-winged doves.

And in Waco in the riverside park along the Brazos

where the city fathers might spend a little more money

picking up the blown-about wrappers of fast food,

even if it would constitute an activity of government,

not far from the marker commemorating the founding

of this city of Baptists by a Caribbean Jew who arrived

from Jamaica on a riverboat, or from the Browning Chapel

at Baylor where the words of two English poets

are lit by the heat of the spring sun and the reds and blues

of Arts & Crafts glass, what is that racket in the trees?

Boat-tailed grackles and white-winged doves.

And in San Antonio where Louisiana live oaks on the campus

of the university are married to red brick in paradise

and along the river that the Cozhuitlan people called Yanaguana

where the Canary Island families settled with inducements

by the Spanish crown, so that two hundred years later

General Antonio López de Santa Anna crushed those Yankee insurgents

and tax resisters at the old Pueblo of the Alamo

or where, in the other telling, Travis and Bowie and Crockett,

under the spindly cottonwoods, would not be brought to their knees.

Cottonwood by the river, live oaks in the park and what is that racket?

Boat-tailed grackles and white-winged doves.

North of there the air changes a little and imperceptibly,

in this valley or that, so the species of willow along the river

change and the insects in the leaves and the size of fruit

and the seeds scattered on the lawns of small towns

with their statues of soldiers from the various wars

are not so large and require different claws or beaks

and you come to a place of mourning doves and Inca doves

with their fluting coos and mute blackbirds with yellow eyes.

So what is this business of walls and border guards?

Who owns that country anyway? What was that racket in the trees?

Ay-yi-yi-yi. Boat-tailed grackles and white-winged doves.

Everyone comes here from a long way off

(is a line from a poem I read last night).