Free The Apple Trees at Olema by Robert Hass Page A

clean-shaven man
    smelling of lotion,
    lint-free, walking
    toward his work, a
    pure exclusive music
    in his mind.
    The mother of the neighbor
    child was thirty-one,
    died, at Sunday breakfast,
    of a swelling in the throat.
    on a toy loom
    she taught my daughter
    how to weave. My daughter
    was her friend
    and now she cannot sleep
    for nighttime sirens,
    sure that every wail
    is someone dead.
    Should I whisper in her ear,
    death is the mother
    of beauty? Wooden
    nickels, kid? It’s all in
    shapeliness, give your
    fears a shape?
    In fact, we hide together
    in her books.
    Prairie farms, the heron
    knows the way, old
    country songs, herbal magic,
    recipes for soup,
    tales of spindly orphan
    girls who find
    the golden key, the
    darkness at the center
    of the leafy wood.
    And when she finally sleeps
    I try out Chekhov’s
    tenderness to see
    what it can save.
    Maryushka the beekeeper’s
    widow,
    though three years mad,
    writes daily letters
    to her son. Semyon transcribes
    them. The pages
    are smudged by his hands,
    stained with
    the dregs of tea:
    â€œMy dearest Vanushka,
    Sofia Agrippina’s ill
    again. The master
    asks for you. Wood
    is dear. The cold
    is early. Poor
    Sofia Agrippina!
    The foreign doctor
    gave her salts
    but Semyon says her icon
    candle guttered
    St. John’s Eve. I am afraid,
    Vanya. When she ’s ill,
    the master likes to have
    your sister flogged.
    She means no harm.
    The rye is gray
    this time of year.
    When it is bad, Vanya,
    I go into the night
    and the night eats me.”
    The haiku comes
    in threes
    with the virtues of brevity:
    What a strange thing!
    To be alive
    beneath plum blossoms.
    The black-headed
    Steller’s jay is squawking
    in our plum.
    Thief! Thief!
    A hard, indifferent bird,
    he’d snatch your life.
    The love of books
    is for children
    who glimpse in them
    a life to come, but
    I have come
    to that life and
    feel uneasy
    with the love of books.
    This is my life,
    time islanded
    in poems of dwindled time.
    There is no other world.
    But I have seen it twice.
    In the Palo Alto marsh
    sea birds rose in early light
    and took me with them.
    Another time, dreaming,
    river birds lifted me,
    swans, small angelic terns,
    and an old woman in a shawl
    dying by a dying lake
    whose life raised men
    from the dead
    in another country.
    Thick nights, and nothing
    lets us rest. In the heat
    of mid-July our lust
    is nothing. We swell
    and thicken. Slippery,
    purgatorial, our sexes
    will not give us up.
    Exhausted after hours
    and not undone,
    we crave cold marrow
    from the tiny bones that
    moonlight scatters
    on our skin. Always
    morning arrives,
    the stunned days,
    faceless, droning
    in the juice of rotten quince,
    the flies, the heat.
    Tears, silence.
    The edified generations
    eat me, Maryushka.
    I tell them
    pain is form and
    almost persuade
    myself. They are not
    listening. Why
    should they? Who
    cannot save me anymore
    than I, weeping
    over Great Russian Short
    Stories in summer,
    under the fattened figs,
    saved you. Besides,
    it is winter there.
    They are trying out
    a new recipe for onion soup.
    Use a heavy-bottomed
    three- or four-quart pan.
    Thinly slice six large
    yellow onions and sauté
    in olive oil and butter
    until limp. Pour in
    beef broth. Simmer
    thirty minutes,
    add red port and bake
    for half an hour. Then
    sprinkle half a cup
    of diced Gruyère and cover
    with an even layer
    of toasted bread and
    shredded Samsoe. Dribble
    melted butter on the top
    and bake until the cheese
    has bubbled gold.
    Surround yourself with friends.
    Huddle in a warm place.
    Ladle. Eat.
    Weave and cry.
    Child, every other siren
    is a death;
    the rest are for speeding.
    Look how comically the jay’s
    black head emerges
    from a swath of copper leaves.
    Half the terror
    is the fact that,
    in our time, speed saves us,
    a whine we’ve traded
    for the hopeless patience
    of the village bell
    which tolled in threes:
    weave and cry and weave.
    Wilhelm Steller, form’s
    hero,