Read The Apple Trees at Olema Online
Authors: Robert Hass
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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
Thatâthe rage to hurt mixed up
With self-righteousnessâthat'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
âGoetheâno,
Warte nur, balde ruhest du auch
. Just wait.
You will be quiet soon enough. In Dahlem,
Under the chestnuts, in the leafy spring.
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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 illnessâ
Scarlet fever, I think (in the dream it was scarlet fever)â
And the illustration of a dying child, “the dew of death”
Spotting her forehead in the Edwardian etchingâ
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 centuryâ
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 soundâ
I must have been six, the story not addressed to meâ
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 dreamâhe was
The most competent of men, had served in the infantry
In the Meuse-Argonneâbrings 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 ofâwas it Belleau Wood?â
The Argonne forest??âas 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 bridgeâ
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 clearlyâ
I think it is red on the wing tipsâ-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.
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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 announcedâ
I couldn't readâthe 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.
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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.