The Apple Trees at Olema (26 page)

I typed the brief phrase, “Bush's War,”

At the top of a sheet of white paper,

Having some dim intuition of a poem

Made luminous by reason that would,

Though I did not have them at hand,

Set the facts out in an orderly way.

Berlin is a northerly city. In May

At the end of the twentieth century

In the leafy precincts of Dahlem-Dorf,

South of the Grunewald, near Krumme Lanke,

The northern spring begins before dawn

In a racket of birdsong, when the
amsels
,

Black European thrushes, shiver the sun up

As if they were shaking a great tangle

of golden wire. There are two kinds

of flowering chestnuts, red and white,

And the wet pavements are speckled

With petals from the incandescent spikes

of their flowers; the shoes at U-Bahn stops

Are flecked with them. Green of holm oaks,

Birch tassels, the soft green of maples,

And the odor of lilacs is everywhere.

At Oskar-Helene-Heim station a farmer

Sells white asparagus from a heaped table.

In a month he'll be selling chanterelles;

In the month after that, strawberries

And small, rosy crawfish from the Spree.

The piles of stalks of the asparagus

Are startlingly phallic, phallic and tender

And deathly pale. Their seasonal appearance

Must be the remnant of some fertility ritual

of the German tribes. Steamed, they are the color

of old ivory. In May, in restaurants

They are served on heaped white platters

With boiled potatoes and parsley butter,

or shavings of Parma ham and lemon juice

or sprigs of sorrel and smoked salmon. And,

Walking home in the slant, widening,

Brilliant northern light that falls

on the new-leaved birches and the elms,

Nightingales singing at the first, subtlest

Darkening of dusk, it is a trick of the mind

That the past seems just ahead of us,

As if we were being shunted there

In the surge of a rattling funicular.

Flash forward: firebombing of Hamburg,

Fifty thousand dead in a single night,

“The children's bodies the next day

Set in the street in rows like a market

In charred chicken.” Flash forward:

Firebombing of Tokyo, a hundred thousand

In a night. Flash forward: forty-five

Thousand Polish officers slaughtered

By the Russian Army in the Katyn Woods,

The work of half a day. Flash forward:

Two million Russian prisoners of war

Murdered by the German army all across

The eastern front, supplies low,

Winter of 1943. Flash: Hiroshima.

Flash: Auschwitz, Dachau, Theresienstadt,

The train lurching and the stomach woozy

Past the displays of falls of hair, the piles

of monogrammed valises, spectacles. Flash:

The gulags, seven million in Byelorussia

And Ukraine. In innocent Europe on a night

In spring, among the light-struck birches,

Students holding hands. one of them

Is carrying a novel, the German translation

of a slim book by Marguerite Duras

About a love affair in old Saigon. (Flash:

Two million Vietnamese, fifty-five thousand

of the American young, whole races

of tropical birds extinct from saturation bombing)

The kind of book the young love

To love, about love in time of war.

Forty-five million, all told, in World War II.

In Berlin, pretty Berlin, in the springtime,

You are never not wondering how

It happened, and these Germans, too,

Children then, or unborn, never not

Wondering. Is it that we like the kissing

And bombing together, in prospect

At least, girls in their flowery dresses?

Someone will always want to mobilize

Death on a massive scale for economic

Domination or revenge. And the task, taken

As a task, appeals to the imagination.

The military is an engineering profession.

Look at boys playing: they love

To figure out the ways to blow things up.

But the rest of us have to go along.

Why do we do it? Certainly there 's a rage

To injure what's injured us. Wars

Are always pitched to us that way.

The well-paid newsreaders read the reasons

on the air. And the us who are injured,

or have been convinced that we are injured,

Are always identified with virtue. It's

That—the rage to hurt mixed up

With self-righteousness—that's murderous.

The young Arab depilated himself as an act

of purification before he drove the plane

Into the office building. It's not just

The violence, it's a taste for power

That amounts to contempt for the body.

The rest of us have to act like we believe

The dead women in the rubble of Baghdad,

Who did not cast a vote for their deaths

or the raw white of the exposed bones

In the bodies of their men or their children,

Are being given the gift of freedom

Which is the virtue of the injured us.

It's hard to say which is worse, the moral

Sloth of it or the intellectual disgrace.

And what good is indignation to the dead?

or our mild forms of rational resistance?

And death the cleanser, Walt Whitman's

Sweet death, the scourer, the tender

Lover, shutter of eyelids, turns

The heaped bodies into summer fruit,

Magpies eating dark berries in the dusk

And birch pollen staining sidewalks

To the faintest gold.
Balde nur
—Goethe—no,

Warte nur, balde ruhest du auch
. Just wait.

You will be quiet soon enough. In Dahlem,

Under the chestnuts, in the leafy spring.

My English uncle, a tall, shambling man, is very old

In the dream (he has been dead for thirty years)

And wears his hound's-tooth jacket of soft tweed.

Standing against one wall, he looks nervous, panicked.

When I walk up to him to ask if he 's all right, he explains

In his wry way that he is in the midst of an anxiety attack

And can't move. I see that his hands are trembling. “Fault

of Arthur Conan Doyle.” I remembered the story.

He was raised among almond orchards on a ranch

In the dry, hot California foothills. Something

About reading a description of an illness—

Scarlet fever, I think (in the dream it was scarlet fever)—

And the illustration of a dying child, “the dew of death”

Spotting her forehead in the Edwardian etching—

Reading by oil lamp a book that his parents had brought

From Liverpool, the deep rural dark outside of winter

And night and night sounds at the turn of the last century—

He had cried out and hurled the book across the room.

He had told this story in an amused drawl (but not

In the dream, in my memory of a childhood summer

Which was not a dream, may not have been a dream)

In a canoe on the river, paddle in his hand, eyes

Looking past us at the current and the green surface

of the water. “Agggh.” He had imitated the sound—

I must have been six, the story not addressed to me—

And made the gesture of hurling with the stem of the paddle.

In the dream something had triggered this memory

And the paralyzing fear. I ask him how I can help.

“Just don't go away,” he says, calling me “young Robert,”

As he did, as I remember he did. He takes my hand

And his helplessness in my dream—he was

The most competent of men, had served in the infantry

In the Meuse-Argonne—brings me, in the dream,

To tears. There is a view onto a garden from the upper room

Where he stands with his back pinned to the wall.

He has begun to weep, his shoulders shaking.

Now, outside the dream, I remember overhearing

Him describe the battle of–was it Belleau Wood?—

The Argonne forest??—as a butcher shop, also in his dry,

Slightly barking voice, and then he put down a card,

My parents and my aunt and he played bridge—

And said, “A very smoky butcher shop.” Now,

Not in the dream, an image of the small cut glass dish

Into which my aunt put small festively colored candies

That were called “a bridge mix.” And the memory

of a taste like anise, like a California summer.

Though I don't know how I know it, I know

That there had been a long and lavish party

on the lawn outside which resembles, oddly,

The Luxembourg Gardens and, somewhere

In the dream, I notice, to my surprise, a bird,

Brilliantly yellow, a European goldfinch, perhaps,

Red in the wing tips, high up among the leaves

of an espaliered pear tree, on which each of the pears

Has been wrapped in a translucent paper packet.

I experience my interest in the bird as irresponsible.

My uncle is holding my hand very tightly and I

Lean just a little to the left to see the bird more clearly—

I think it is red on the wing tips—-and from that angle

I can see the child's body slumped under the pear tree,

And think, “Well, that explains his panic,” and,

When I look again, the bird, of course, has flown.

our Grandma Dahling arrived from the train station

In a limousine: an old Lincoln touring car

With immense, black, shiny, rounded fenders

And a silver ornament of Nike on the hood.

She wore a long black coat and pearl-gray gloves.

White hair, very soft white, and carefully curled.

Also rimless glasses with thin gold frames.

once in the house, having presented ourselves

To be hugged completely, the important thing

Was to watch her take off her large, black,

Squarish, thatched, and feathered confection of a hat.

She raised both hands above her head, elbows akimbo,

Lifting the black scrim of a veil in the process,

Removed a pin from either side, and lifted it,

Gingerly, straight up, as if it were a saucer of water

That I must not spill, and then she set it down,

Carefully, solicitously even, as if it were a nest

of fledgling birds (which it somewhat resembled),

And then there arrived, after she had looked at the hat

For a moment to see that it wasn't going to move,

The important thing. Well, she would say, well, now,

In a musical German-inflected English, touching together

Her two soft, white, ungloved hands from which emanated

The slightly spiced, floral scent of some hand lotion

That made the hands of great-grandmothers singularly soft,

And regard us, and shake her head just a little, but for a while,

To express her wonder at our palpable bodies before her,

And then turn to her suitcase on the sea chest in the hall,

Not having been transferred yet to her bedroom by my father

Who had hauled it up the long, precipitous front stairs;

She flipped open the brass clasps and the shield-shaped lock

She had not locked and opened the case to a lavender interior

From which rose the scent of chocolate, mingled faintly

With the smell of anise from the Christmas cookies

That she always baked. But first were the paper mats

From the dining car of the California Zephyr, adorned

With soft pastel images of what you might see

From the vista Car: Grand Canyon, Mount Shasta,

A slightly wrinkled Bridal veil Falls, and, serene, contemplative

Almost, a view of Lake Louise, intimate to me because,

Although it was Canadian, it bore my mother's name.

My brother and I each got two views. He, being the eldest,

Always took Grand Canyon, which I found obscurely terrifying

And so being second was always a relief. I took Lake Louise

And he took Half Dome and the waterfall, and she looked surprised

That we were down to one and handed me the brooding angel,

Shasta. And then from under layers of shimmery print dresses,

She produced, as if relieved that it wasn't lost, the largest chocolate bar

That either of us had ever seen. Wrapped in dignified brown paper,

on which ceremonial, silvery capital letters must have announced—

I couldn't read—the sort of thing it was. These were the war years.

Chocolate was rationed. The winey, dark scent rose like manna

In the air and filled the room. My brother, four years older,

Says this never happened. Not once. She never visited the house

on Jackson Street with its sea air and the sound of foghorns

At the Gate. I thought it might help to write it down here

That the truth of things might be easier to come to

on a quiet evening in the clear, dry, mountain air.

The white-water rush of some warbler's song.

Last night, a few strewings of ransacked moonlight

on the sheets. You don't know what slumped forward

In the nineteen-forties taxi or why they blamed you

or what the altered landscape, willowy, riparian,

Had to do with the reasons why everyone

Should be giving things away, quickly,

From a spendthrift sorrow that, because it can't bear

The need to be forgiven, keeps looking for something

To forgive. The motion of washing machines

Is called agitation. object constancy is a term

Devised to indicate what a child requires

From days. Clean sheets are an example

of something that, under many circumstances,

A person can control. The patterns moonlight makes

Are chancier, and dreams, well, dreams

Will have their way with you, their way

With you, will have their way.