Read The Apple Trees at Olema Online
Authors: Robert Hass
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Sometimes from this hillside just after sunset
The rim of the sky takes on a tinge
of the palest green, like the flesh of a cucumber
When you peel it carefully.
In Crete once, in the summer,
When it was still hot at midnight,
We sat in a taverna by the water
Watching the squid boats rocking in the moonlight,
Drinking retsina and eating salads
of cool, chopped cucumber and yogurt and a little dill.
A hint of salt, something like starch, something
Like an attar of grasses or green leaves
on the tongue is the tongue
And the cucumber
Evolving toward each other.
Since
cumbersome
is a word,
Cumber
must have been a word,
Lost to us now, and even then,
For a person feeling encumbered,
It must have felt orderly and right-minded
To stand at a sink and slice a cucumber.
If you think I am going to make
A sexual joke in this poem, you are mistaken.
In the old torment of the earth
When the fires were cooling and disposing themselves
Into granite and limestone and serpentine and shale,
It is possible to imagine that, under yellowish chemical clouds,
The molten froth, having burned long enough,
Was already dreaming of release,
And that the dream, dimly
But with increasing distinctness, took the form
of water, and that it was then, still more dimly, that it imagined
The dark green skin and opal green flesh of cucumbers.
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How much damage do you think we do,
making love this way when we can hardly stand
each other?âI can stand you. You're the rare person
I can always stand.âWell, yes, but you know what I mean.
â-I'm not sure I do. I think I'm more lighthearted
about sex than you are. I think it's a little tiresome
to treat it like a fucking sacrament.âNot much of a pun.
âNot much. (She licks tiny wavelets of dried salt
from the soft flesh of his inner arm. He reaches up
to whisk sand from her breast.)âAnd I do like you. Mostly.
I don't think you can expect anyone's imagination
to light up over the same person all the time. (Sand,
peppery flecks of it, cling to the rosy, puckered skin
of her aureola in the cooling air. He studies it,
squinting, then sucks her nipple lightly.)â
Umnh
.
âI'm angry. You're not really here. We come
as if we were opening a wound.âSpeak for yourself.
(A young woman, wearing the ochre apron of the hotel staff,
emerges from dune grass in the distance. She carries
snow-white towels they watch her stack on a table
under an umbrella made of palm fronds.)âLook,
I know you're hurt. I think you want me
to feel guilty and I don't.â-I don't want you
to feel guilty.â-What do you want then?
âI don't know. Dinner. (The woman is humming something
they hear snatches of, rising and fading on the breeze.)
âThat's the girl who lost her child last winter.
âHow do you know these things? (She slips
into her suit top.)âI talk to people. I talked
to the girl who cleans our room. (He squints
down the beach again, shakes his head.)
âPoor kid. (She kisses his cheekbone.
He squirms into his trunks.)
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“â¦
WHITE OF FORGETFULNESS, WHITE OF SAFETY”
My mother was burning in a closet.
Creek water wrinkling over stones.
Sister Damien, in fifth grade, loved teaching mathematics.
Her full white sleeve, when she wrote on the board,
Swayed like the slow movement of a hunting bird,
Egret in the tidal flats,
Swan paddling in a pond.
Let A equal the distance between x and y.
The doves in the desert,
Their cinnamon coverts when they flew.
People made arguments. They had reasons for their appetites.
A child could see it wasn't true.
In the picture of the Last Supper on the classroom wall,
All the apostles had beautiful pastel robes,
Each one the color of a flavor of sherbet.
A line is the distance between two points.
A point is indivisible.
Not a statement of fact; a definition.
It took you a second to understand the difference,
And then you loved it, loved reason,
Moving as a swan moves in a millstream.
I would not have betrayed the Lord
Before the cock crowed thrice,
But I was a child, what could I do
When they came for him?
Ticking heat, the scent of sage,
of pennyroyal. The structure of every living thing
Was praying for rain.
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Is, more or less, the title of a poem by John Ashbery and has
No investment in the fact that you can get an adolescent
of the human species to do almost anything (and when adolescence
In the human species ends is what The Fat Man in
The Maltese Falcon
Calls “a nice question, sir, a very nice question indeed”)
Which is why they are tromping down a road in Fallujah
In combat gear and a hundred and fifteen degrees of heat
This morning and why a young woman is strapping
Twenty pounds of explosives to her mortal body in Jerusalem.
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
Have I mentioned
That the other law of human nature is that human beings
Will do anything they see someone else do and someone
Will do almost anything? There is probably a waiter
In this country so clueless he wears a T-shirt in the gym
That says Da Meat Tree. Not our protagonist. American amnesia
Is such that he may very well be the great-grandson
of the elder Karamazov brother who fled to the Middle West
With his girlfriend Grushenkaâhe never killed his father,
It isn't true that he killed his fatherâbut his religion
Was that woman's honey-colored head, an ideal tangible
Enough to die for, and he lived for it: in Buffalo,
New York, or Sandusky, Ohio. He never learned much English,
But he slept beside her in the night until she was an old woman
Who still knew her way to the Russian pharmacist
In a Chicago suburb where she could buy sachets of the herbs
of the Russian summer that her coarse white nightgown
Smelled of as he fell asleep, though he smoked Turkish cigarettes
And could hardly smell. Grushenka got two boys out of her body,
one was born in 1894, the other in 1896,
The elder having died in the mud at the Battle of the Somme
From a piece of shrapnel manufactured by Alfred Nobel.
Metal traveling at that speed works amazing transformations
on the tissues of the human intestine; the other son worked construction
The year his mother died. If they could have, they would have,
If not filled, half-filled her coffin with the petals
of buckwheat flowers from which Crimean bees made the honey
Bought in the honey market in St. Petersburg (not far
From the place where Raskolnikov, himself an adolescent male,
Couldn't kill the old moneylender without killing her saintly sister,
But killed her nevertheless in a fit of guilt and reasoning
Which went something like this: since the world
Evidently consists in the ravenous pursuit of wealth
And power and in the exploitation and prostitution
of women, except the wholly self-sacrificing ones
Who make you crazy with guilt, and since I am going
To be the world, I might as well take an ax to the head
of this woman who symbolizes both usury and the guilt
The virtue and suffering of women induces in men,
And be done with it). I frankly admit the syntax
of that sentence, like the intestines slithering from the hands
of the startled boys clutching their belly wounds
At the Somme, has escaped my grip. I step over it
Gingerly. Where were we? Not far from the honey market,
Which is not far from the hay market. It is important
To remember that the teeming cities of the nineteenth century
Were site central for horsewhipping. Humans had domesticated
The race of horses some ten centuries before, harnessed them,
Trained them, whipped them mercilessly for recalcitrance
In Vienna, Prague, Naples, London, and Chicago, according
To the novels of the period which may have been noticing this
For the first time or registering an actual statistical increase
In either human brutality or the insurrectionary impulse
In horses, which were fed hay, so there was, of course,
In every European city a hay market like the one in which
Raskolnikov kissed the earth from a longing for salvation.
Grushenka, though Dostoyevsky made her, probably did not
Have much use for novels of ideas. Her younger son,
A master carpenter, eventually took a degree in engineering
From Bucknell University. He married an Irish girl
From Vermont who was descended from the gardener
of Emily Dickinson, but that's another story. Their son
In Iwo Jima died. Gangrene. But he left behind, curled
In the body of the daughter of a Russian Jewish cigar maker
from Minsk, the fetal curl of a being who became the lead dancer
In the Cleveland Ballet, radiant Tanya, who turned in
A bad knee sometime in early 1971, just after her brother ate it
In Cao Dai Dien, for motherhood, which brings us
To our waiter, Dmitri, who, you will have noticed, is not in Baghdad.
He doesn't even want to be an actor. He has been offered
Roles in several major motion pictures and refused them
Because he is, in fact, under contract to John Ashbery
Who is a sane and humane man and has no intention
of releasing him from the poem. You can get killed out there.
He is allowed to go home for his mother's birthday and she
Has described to him on the phoneâa cell phone, he 's
Walking down Christopher Street with such easy bearing
He could be St. Christopher bearing innocence across a riverâ
Having come across a lock, the delicate curl of a honey-
Colored lock of his great-grandmother's Crimean-
Honey-bee-pollen-, Russian-spring-wildflower-sachet-
Scented hair in the attic, where it released for her
In the July heat and raftery midsummer dark the memory
of an odor like life itself carried to her on the wind.
Here is your sea bass with a light lemon and caper sauce.
Here is your dish of raspberries and chocolate; notice
Their subtle transfiguration of the colors of excrement and blood;
And here are the flecks of crystallized lavender that stipple it.
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“You would think God would relent,” the American poet Richard Eberhardt wrote during World War II, “listening to the fury of aerial bombardment.” Of course, God is not the cause of aerial bombardment. During the Vietnam War, the United States hired the RAND Corporation to conduct a study of the effects in the peasant villages of Vietnam of their policy of saturation bombing of the countryside. That policy had at least two purposes: to defoliate the tropical forests as a way of locating the enemy and to kill the enemy if he happened to be in the way of the concussion bombs or the napalm or the firebombs. The RAND Corporation sent a young scholar named Leon Goure to Vietnam. His study was rushed by the Air Force which was impatient for results, but he was able to conduct interviews through interpreters with farmers in the Mekong Delta and the mountainous hillside farm regions around Hue. He concluded that the incidental damage to civilian lives was very considerable and that the villagers were angry and afraid, but he also found that they blamed the Viet Congâthe insurrectionist army the U.S. was fightingâand not the United States for their troubles, because they thought of the Viet Cong as their legitimate government and felt it wasn't protecting them. Seeing that the bombing was alienating the peasantry from the enemy Vietnamese, Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense, General William Westmoreland, the commander in charge of prosecuting the war, and Lyndon Johnson, the president of the United States, ordered an intensification of the bombing. In the end, there were more bombs dropped on the villages and forests of South Vietnam than were dropped in all of World War II. The estimated Vietnamese casualties during the war is two million. It was a war whose principal strategy was terror. More Iraqi civilians have now been incidental casualties of the conduct of the war in Iraq than were killed by Arab terrorists in the destruction of the World Trade Center. In the first twenty years of the twentieth century 90 percent of war deaths were the deaths of
combatants. In the last twenty years of the twentieth century 90 percent of war deaths were deaths of civilians. There are imaginable responses to these facts. The nations of the world could stop setting an example for suicide bombers. They could abolish the use of land mines. They could abolish the use of aerial bombardment in warfare. You would think men would relent.