Authors: Robert Hass

The Apple Trees at Olema (27 page)

BOOK: The Apple Trees at Olema

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P
OET'S
W
ORK

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.

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

Marie and Julia had spread baskets of focaccia,

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.

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.

M
OUTH
S
LIGHTLY
O
PEN

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.

O
LD
M
OVIE WITH THE
S
OUND
T
URNED
O
FF

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 herâ
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 raffledâ

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

Childhood into which the custom had persistedâ

Sets of dishes in the intermission of the double featureâ

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 overcoatsâexcept for him. His coat is camel

(Was it the material or the color?âmy 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 beforeâthe singer

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

From a nemesis involving his brother, the district attorney,

And a rival mobâI 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.”

E
ZRA
P
OUND'S
P
ROPOSITION

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 FrÃ¨res 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.

O
N
V
ISITING THE
DMZ
AT
P
ANMUNJON
:
A H
AIBUN

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 facts, 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

âriver mist? a wedding party?

is cattle egrets nesting in the willows.

C
ONSCIOUSNESS

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.

“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 MÃ©dicine 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 perceptionâthe picture of a field of pure blueâthat 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.

E
XIT
, P
URSUED BY A
S
IERRA
M
EADOW

That slow, rhythmic flickering of the wings,

As if from the ache of pleasureâ

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