The Apple Trees at Olema

by Robert Hass

  you are coming back. Meanwhile

  we are passing through the gate

  with everything we love. We go

  as fire, as flesh, as marble.

  Sometimes it is good and sometimes

  it is dangerous like the ignorance

  of particulars, but our words are clear

  and our movements give off light.

  TRANSPARENT GARMENTS

  Because it is neither easy nor difficult,

  because the other dark is not passport

  nor is the inner dark, the horror

  held in memory as talisman. Not to go in

  stupidly holding out dark as some

  wrong promise of fidelity, but to go in

  as one can, empty or worshipping.

  White, as a proposition. Not leprous

  by easy association nor painfully radiant.

  or maybe that, yes, maybe painfully.

  To go into that. As: I am walking in the city

  and there is the whiteness of the houses,

  little cubes of it bleaching in the sunlight,

  luminous with attritions of light, the failure

  of matter in the steadiness of light,

  a purification, not burning away,

  nothing so violent, something clearer

  that stings and stings and is then

  past pain or this slow levitation of joy.

  And to emerge, where the juniper

  is simply juniper and there is the smell

  of new shingle, a power saw outside

  and inside a woman in the bath,

  a scent of lemon and a drift of song,

  a heartfelt imitation of Bessie Smith.

  The given, as in given up

  or given out, as in testimony.

  THE IMAGE

  The child brought blue clay from the creek

  and the woman made two figures: a lady and a deer.

  At that season deer came down from the mountain

  and fed quietly in the redwood canyons.

  The woman and the child regarded the figure of the lady,

  the crude roundness, the grace, the coloring like shadow.

  They were not sure where she came from,

  except the child’s fetching and the woman’s hands

  and the lead-blue clay of the creek

  where the deer sometimes showed themselves at sundown.

  THE FEAST

  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.

  THE PURE ONES

  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 GARDEN OF DELIGHT

  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.

  SANTA LUCIA

  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

&nbs
p; 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.

  TO A READER

  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.

  THE ORIGIN OF CITIES

  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.

  WINTER MORNING IN CHARLOTTESVILLE

  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.

  OLD DOMINION

  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.

  MONTICELLO

  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.

  EMBLEMS OF A PRIOR ORDER

  (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.

  WEED

  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.

  CHILD NAMING FLOWERS

  When old crones wandered in the woods,

  I was the hero on the hill

  in clear sunlight.

  Death’s hounds feared me.

  Smell of wild fennel,

  high loft of sweet fruit high in the branches

  of the flowering plum.

  Then I am cast down

  into the terror of childhood,

  into the mirror and the greasy knives,

  the dark

  woodpile under the fig trees

  in the dark.

  It is only

  the malice of voices, the old horror

  that is nothing, parents

  quarreling, somebody

  drunk.

  I don’t know how we survive it.

  on this sunny morning

  in my life as an adult, I am looking

  at one clear pure peach

  in a painting by Georgia O’Keeffe.

  It is all the fullness that there is

  in light. A towhee scratches in the leaves

  outside my open door.

  He always does.

  A moment ago I felt so sick

  and so cold

  I could hardly move.

  PICKING BLACKBERRIES WITH A FRIEND WHO HAS BEEN READING JACQUES LACAN

  August is dust here. Drought

  stuns the road,

  but juice gathers in the berries.

  We pick them in the hot