The Apple Trees at Olema

by Robert Hass

  The English wit who complained of sex that the posture

  Was ridiculous had not been struck down by the god

  or goddess to whose marble threshing floor offerings

  of grapes or olive boughs and flowers or branches

  Laden with new fruit or bundles of heavy-headed wheat

  Were brought as to any other mystery or power.

  My friend sat on the back steps on a summer night

  Sick with her dilemma, smoking long cigarettes

  While bats veered in the dark and the scraping sound

  of a neighbor cleaning a grill with a wire brush

  Ratcheted steadily across the backyard fence.

  “He’s the nicest man I could imagine,” she had said,

  “And I feel like I’m dying.” Probably in her middle thirties

  Then. Flea markets on Saturday mornings, family dinners

  on Sunday, a family large enough so that there was always

  A birthday, a maiden aunt from the old neighborhood

  In San Francisco, or a brother-in-law, or some solemn child

  Studying a new toy in silence on the couch.

  Had not lived where, tearing, or like burnished leaves

  In a vortex of wind, the part of you that might observe

  The comedy of gasps and moans gives way, does not

  Demur. Though she did laugh at herself. An erotic

  Attachment one whole winter to the mouth

  of a particular television actor—she ’d turn the TV on—

  Watch him for a minute with a kind of sick yearning—

  Shake her head—turn the TV off—go back to the translation

  of van Gogh’s letters which was her project that year—

  or do some ironing—that always seemed to calm her—

  The sweet iron smell of steam and linen. “Honest to God,”

  She’d say, an expression the elderly aunts might have used,

  “For Pete ’s sake,” she ’d say, “Get yourself together.”

  Hollow flute, or bell not struck, sending out a shimmering

  Not-sound, in waves and waves, to the place where the stunned dead

  In the not-beginning are gathered to the arms of the living

  In the not-noon: the living who grieve, who rage against

  And grieve the always solicited, always unattended dead

  In the tiered plazas or lush meadows of their gathered

  Absence. A man wants a woman that way. A person a person.

  Down on all fours, ravenous and humbled. And later—

  “Lovers, you remember the shoeshine boys in Quito

  In the city market? Missing teeth, unlaced tennis shoes.

  They approach you smiling. Their hands are scrofulous,

  They have no rules, and they’ll steal anything and so

  Would you if you were they.” The old capital has always

  Just been sacked, the temple hangings burned, and peasants

  In the ruins are roasting the royal swans in a small fire

  Coaxed from the sticks of the tax assessor’s Empire chair

  Up against a broken wall. Lent: the saints’ bodies

  Dressed in purple sacks to be taken off at Easter.

  For Magdalen, of course, the resurrection didn’t mean

  She’d got him back. It meant she ’d lost him in another way.

  It was the voice she loved, the body, not the god

  Who, she had been told, ascended to his heaven,

  There to disperse tenderness and pity on the earth.

  FOR CZESŁAW MIŁOSZ IN KRAKÓW

  The fog has hovered off the coast for weeks

  And given us a march of brilliant days

  You wouldn’t recognize—who have grumbled

  So eloquently about gray days on Grizzly Peak—

  Unless they put you in mind of puppet pageants

  Your poems remember from Lithuanian market towns

  Just after the First World War. Here ’s more theater:

  A mule-tail doe gave birth to a pair of fawns

  A couple of weeks ago just outside your study

  In the bed of oxalis by the redwood trees.

  Having dropped by that evening, I saw,

  Though at first I couldn’t tell what I was seeing,

  A fawn, wet and shivering, curled almost

  In a ball under the thicket of hazel and toyon.

  I’ve read somewhere that does hide the young

  As best they can and then go off to browse

  And recruit themselves. They can’t graze the juices

  In the leaves if they stay to protect the newborns.

  It’s the glitch in engineering through which chance

  And terror enter on the world. I looked closer

  At the fawn. It was utterly still and trembling,

  Eyes closed, possibly asleep. I leaned to smell it:

  There was hardly a scent. She had licked all traces

  of the rank birth-smell away. Do you remember

  This fragment from Anacreon?—the context,

  of course, was probably erotic: “…her gently,

  Like an unweaned fawn left alone in a forest

  By its antlered mother, frail, trembling with fright.”

  It’s a verse—you will like this detail—found

  In the papyrus that wrapped a female mummy

  A museum in Cairo was examining in 1956.

  I remember the time that a woman in Portland

  Asked if you were a reader of Flannery O’Connor.

  You winced regretfully, shook your head,

  And said, “You know, I don’t agree with the novel.”

  I think you haven’t agreed, in this same sense,

  With life, never accepted the cruelty in the frame

  of things, brooded on your century, and God the Monster,

  And the smell of summer grasses in the world

  That can hardly be named or remembered

  Past the moment of our wading through them,

  And the world’s poor salvation in the word. Well,

  Dear friend, you resisted. You were not mute.

  Mark tells me he has seen the fawns grazing

  With their mother in the dusk. Gorging on your roses—

  So it seems they made it through the night

  And neither dog nor car has got to them just yet.

  TIME AND MATERIALS

  Gerhard Richter: Abstrakte Bilder

  1.

  To make layers,

  As if they were a steadiness of days:

  It snowed; I did errands at a desk;

  A white flurry out the window thickening; my tongue

  Tasted of the glue on envelopes.

  on this day sunlight on red brick, bare trees,

  Nothing stirring in the icy air.

  on this day a blur of color moving at the gym

  Where the heat from bodies

  Meets the watery, cold surface of the glass.

  Made love, made curry, talked on the phone

  To friends, the one whose brother died

  Was crying and thinking alternately,

  Like someone falling down and getting up

  And running and falling and getting up.

  2.

  The object of this poem is not to annihila

  To not annih

>   The object of this poem is to report a theft,

  In progress, of everything

  That is not these words

  And their disposition on the page.

  The object o f this poem is to report a theft,

  In progress of everything that exists

  That is not these words

  And their disposition on the page.

  The object of his poe is t repor a theft

  In rogres f ever hing at xists

  Th is no ese w rds

  And their disp sit on o the pag

  3.

  To score, to scar, to smear, to streak,

  To smudge, to blur, to gouge, to scrape.

  “Action painting,” i.e.,

  The painter gets to behave like time.

  4.

  The typo wound be “paining.”

  (To abrade.)

  5.

  or to render time and stand outside

  The horizontal rush of it, for a moment

  To have the sensation of standing outside

  The greenish rush of it.

  6.

  Some vertical gesture then, the way that anger

  or desire can rip a life apart,

  Some wound of color.

  ART AND LIFE

  You know that milkmaid in Vermeer? Entirely absorbed

  In the act of pouring a small stream of milk—

  Shocking in the Mauritshuis Museum in The Hague

  To have seen how white it is, and alive, as seeing people

  Reading their poetry or singing in a chorus, you think

  You see the soul is an animal going about its business,

  A squirrel, its coat sheening toward fall, stretching

  Its body down a slim branch to gather one ripe haw

  From a hawthorne, testing the branch with its weight,

  Stilling as it sinks, then gingerly reaching out a paw.

  There is nothing less ambivalent than animal attention

  And so you honor it, admire it even, that her attention,

  Turned away from you, is so alive, and you are melancholy

  Nevertheless. It is best, of course, to be the one engaged

  And being thought of, to be the pouring of the milk.

  In The Hague, in the employee ’s cafeteria, I wondered

  Who the restorer was. The blondish young woman

  In the boxy, expensive Japanese coat picking at a dish

  of cottage cheese—cottage cheese and a pastry? The sugar

  on the bun, long before she woke up, had suffered

  Its transformation in the oven. She seems to be a person

  Who has counted up the cost and decided what to settle for.

  It’s in the way her soft, abstracted mouth

  Receives the bits of bread and the placid sugars.

  or the older man, thinning brown hair, brown tweed coat,

  Brown buckskin shoes like the place where dust and sunset

  Meet and disappear. A mouth formed by private ironies,

  As if he ’d sat silent in too many meetings with people

  He thought more powerful and less intelligent than he.

  or the whip-thin guy with black, slicked-back hair

  And a scarified zigzag flash of lightning at the temple?

  I didn’t know if there was a type. I wanted

  To interview her, or him. What do you do with your life?

  I am an acolyte. I peel time, with absolute care,

  From thin strips of paint on three-hundred-year-old canvas.

  I make the milk milk that flows from the gray-brown paint

  of a pitcher held by a represented woman, young, rose

  And tender yellow for the cheek the light is lucky enough

  To seem to touch, by a certain window that refracts it.

  I am the servant of a gesture so complete, a body

  So at peace, it has become a thought, entirely its own,

  And, though it stills desire, infinitely to be desired,

  Though neither known nor possessed by you

  or anyone else. The man in black must be an assistant curator.

  He looks like he thinks he is a work of art. Everywhere

  In The Hague the low-lying smell of sea salt.

  We don’t know a thing about the mother of Vermeer.

  obviously he displaced her nipple there, took

  The whole Madonna tradition and turned it into light and milk

  By some meticulous habit of mind the geometries

  of composition worked in him. And her: strong Dutch body,

  Almost tender light, the plainness of the room,

  The rich red rug her skin, reddened a little

  From the roughness of a towel perhaps, picks up.

  And the upward thrust of what longing stirs in you

  Toward what dark and what dazed, grateful afterward.

  one of you touches the vein in the other’s neck,

  Feels the pulse there as a shock, the current of a river

  or the drawing down of milk. Who wants Amida’s Western Paradise

  When there is all this world for tongue to taste,

  Fingers to touch, small hairs like spun silkweed

  Furling on another’s arms and legs and lower back.

  And so you talk. Always then the other shock

  of the singular, lived life, a mother in a rest home,

  Maybe, a difficult person, grievous or vindictive.

  The gossip of the other servants. A brother who works

  As a hosteler at an inn and has grand plans.

  You listen. You learned long ago the trick

  of not thinking what you’re going to say next

  When the other person’s speaking. Part of you

  Drinks her in like milk. Part of you begins to notice

  That she is trying out self-deceptions in the account

  of some difficulty, lazily formulated. You watch her

  Shake her head in self-correction; you notice

  That she has a mind that wants to get things right.

  The tremor of her body makes a nuzzling notion

  Along your flank and you reach down to feel again

  The wetness which is what we have instead of the luminosity

  of paint. Afterward, in one of those tracks the mind

  Returns to when it’s on its feet again, she speaks

  of Hans, the butler, how he bullies the girls,

  Prays vigorously at hourly intervals on Sunday.

  It is Sunday. Now she’s getting dressed. You’ve agreed

  To call the cab and take her to her mother

  Up in Gronigen. She ’s grateful, a little teary,

  Makes her first small gesture of possession,

  Brushing off your coat. outside you can hear

  The hoofbeats of shod horses on the cobbles.

  It’s the moment when the burden of another person’s life

  Seems insupportable. We want to be reborn incessantly

  But actually doing it begins—have you noticed?

  To seem redundant. Here is the life that chose you

  And the one you chose. Here is the brush, horsehair,

  Hair of the badger, the goat’s beard, the sable,

  And here is the smell of paint. The volatile, sharp oils

  of lins
eed, rapeseed. Here is the stench of the essence

  of pinewood in a can of turpentine. Here is the hand,

  Flick of wrist, tendon-ripple of the brushstroke. Here—

  Cloud, lake water lifting on a summer morning,

  Ash and ash and chalky ash—is the stickiness of paint

  Adhering to the woven flax of the canvas, here

  Is the faithfulness of paint on paint on paint on paint.

  Something stays this way, something comes alive

  We cannot have, can have because we cannot have it.

  DOMESTIC INTERIORS

  1.

  A house of old, soft, gray, salt-lustered wood,

  Windows onto dune grass and a beach.

  His wife is upstairs working in her study

  When the doorbell rings. The young man at the door,

  A Jehovah’s Witness, has an Adam’s apple

  So protuberant it’s conducting a flirtation

  With deformity. The man, trying not to stare,

  Has a saddened panicked premonition

  That his wife needs help, and then a stronger feeling

  That he has no wife, has never had a wife.

  The young man, eyes contracted by concentration,

  Is talking about what he calls “the first awakening.”

  2.

  When the lights went out, she drove to town

  And bought a lot of candles. The whole village

  Was in the general store buying flashlights,

  Batteries, oil lamps, oil lamp mantles, fuel,

  Telling the story of where they were

  When everything went dark, lingering

  Awhile in this sudden village in the village.

  When she got home, the power was restored.

  That’s how the radio described it: “power restored.”

  3.

  She woke him to say that everything was loud,

  The night bird’s song, the white of the daisies

  In the garden in the dark. Then she woke him

  To describe headlights on the road across the bay:

  They seemed as lonely as the earth. He said

  At that hour it must have been a fisherman,