Free The Apple Trees at Olema by Robert Hass

spring here—wet trees, a reptile odor in the earth, mild greening—and the seasonal myths lie across one another in the quick darkening of days. Kristin and Luke are bent to a puzzle, some allegory of the quattrocento cut in a thousand small uneven pieces which, on the floor, they recompose with rapt, leisurely attention. Kristin asks, searching for a piece round at one end, fluted at the other, “Do you know what a shepherd is?” and Luke, looking for a square edge with a sprig of Italian olive in it, makes a guess. “Somebody who hurts sheep.” My grandmother was not so old. She was my mother’s mother; I think, the night before, my father must have told her we were going to move. She held me weeping, probably, because she felt she was about to lose her daughter. We only buried her this year. In the genteel hotel on Leavenworth that looked across a mile of human misery to the bay, she smoked regally, complained about her teeth. Luke watched her wide-eyed, with a mingled look of wonder and religious dread she seemed so old. And once, when he reached up involuntarily to touch her withered cheek, she looked at him awhile and patted his cheek back and winkedand said to me, askance: “old age ain’t for sissies.” This has nothing to do with the odd terror in my memory. It only explains it—the way this early winter weather makes life seem more commonplace and—at a certain angle—more intense. It is not poetry, where decay and a created radiance lie hidden inside words the way that memory folds them into living. “o Westmoreland thou art a summer bird that ever in the haunch of winter sings the lifting up of day.” Pasternak translated those lines. I imagine Russian summer, the smell of jasmine drifting toward the porch. I would like to get on a plane, but I would also like to sit on the porch and watch one shrink to the hovering of gulls and glint in the distance, circle east toward snow and disappear. He would have noticed the articles as a native speaker wouldn’t: a bird, the haunch; and understood a little what persists when, eyes half-closed, lattice-shadow on his face, he murmured the phrase in the dark vowels of his mother tongue.
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    S ONGS TO S URVIVE THE S UMMER
    It’s funny, isn’t it, Karamazov,
    all this grief and pancakes afterwards…
    These are the dog days,
    unvaried
    except by accident,
    mist rising from soaked lawns,
    gone world, everything
    rises and dissolves in air,
    whatever it is would
    clear the air
    dissolves in air and the knot
    of day unties
    invisibly like a shoelace.
    The gray-eyed child
    who said to my child: “Let’s play
    in my yard. It’s OK,
    my mother’s dead.”
    Under the loquat tree.
    It’s almost a song,
    the echo of a song:
    on the bat’s back I fly
    merrily toward summer
    or at high noon
    in the outfield clover
    guzzling orange Crush,
    time endless, examining
    a wooden coin I’d carried
    all through summer
    without knowing it.
    The coin was grandpa’s joke,
    carved from live oak,
    Indian side and buffalo side.
    His eyes lustered with a mirth
    so deep and rich he never
    laughed, as if it were a cosmic
    secret that we shared.
    I never understood; it married
    in my mind with summer. Don’t
    take any wooden nickels,
    kid, and gave me one
    under the loquat tree.
    The squalor of mind
    is formlessness,
    informis,
    the Romans said of ugliness,
    it has no form,
    a man’s misery, bleached skies,
    the war between desire
    and dailiness. I thought
    this morning of Wallace Stevens
    walking equably to work
    and of a morning two Julys ago
    on Chestnut Ridge, wandering
    down the hill when one
    rusty elm leaf, earth-
    skin peeling, wafted
    by me on the wind.
    My body groaned toward fall
    and preternaturally
    a heron lifted from the pond.
    I even thought I heard
    the ruffle of the wings
    three hundred yards below me
    rising from the reeds.
    Death is the mother of beauty
    and that