Free The Apple Trees at Olema by Robert Hass Page B

made
    a healing broth.
    He sailed with Bering
    and the crew despised him,
    a mean impatient man
    born low enough
    to hate the lower class.
    For two years
    he’d connived to join
    the expedition and put
    his name to all the beasts
    and flowers of the north.
    Now, Bering sick,
    the crew half-mad with scurvy,
    no one would let him
    go ashore. Panic,
    the maps were useless,
    the summer weather almost gone.
    He said, there are herbs
    that can cure you,
    I can save you all. He didn’t
    give a damn about them
    and they knew it. For two years
    he’d prepared. Bering listened.
    Asleep in his bunk, he ’d
    seen death writing in the log.
    on the island while
    the sailors searched for water
    Steller gathered herbs
    and looking up
    he saw the blue, black-crested
    bird, shrilling in a pine.
    His mind flipped to
    Berlin, the library, a glimpse
    he’d had at Audubon,
    a blue-gray crested bird
    exactly like the one
    that squawked at him, a
    Carolina jay, unlike
    any European bird; he knew
    then where they were,
    America, we’re saved.
    No one believed him or,
    sick for home, they didn’t care
    what wilderness
    it was. They set sail
    west. Bering died.
    Steller’s jay , by which
    I found Alaska.
    He wrote it in his book.
    Saved no one. Still
    walking in the redwoods
    I hear the cry
    thief, thief , and
    think of Wilhelm Steller;
    in my dream we
    are all saved. Camping
    on a clement shore
    in early fall, a strange land.
    We feast most delicately.
    The swans are stuffed with grapes,
    the turkey with walnut
    and chestnut and wild plum.
    The river is our music: unalaska
    (to make bread from acorns
    we leach the tannic acid out—
    this music, child,
    and more, much more!).
    When I was just
    your age, the war was over
    and we moved.
    An Okie family lived
    next door to our new
    country house. That summer
    Quincy Phipps was saved.
    The next his house became
    an unofficial Pentecostal church.
    Summer nights: hidden
    in the garden I ate figs,
    watched where the knobby limbs
    rose up and flicked
    against the windows where
    they were. O Je-sus .
    Kissed and put to bed,
    I slipped from the window
    to the eaves and nestled
    by the loquat tree.
    The fruit was yellow-brown
    in daylight; under the moon
    pale clusters hung
    like other moons, O
    Je-sus , and I picked them;
    the fat juices
    dribbling down my chin,
    I sucked and listened.
    Men groaned. The women
    sobbed and moaned, a
    long unsteady belly-deep
    bewildering sound, half
    pleasure and half pain
    that ended sometimes
    in a croon, a broken song:
    O Je-sus ,
    Je-sus .
    That is what I have
    to give you, child, stories,
    songs, loquat seeds,
    curiously shaped; they
    are the frailest stay against
    our fears. Death
    in the sweetness, in the bitter
    and the sour, death
    in the salt, your tears,
    this summer ripe and overripe.
    It is a taste in the mouth,
    child. We are the song
    death takes its own time
    singing. It calls us
    as I call you child
    to calm myself. It is every
    thing touched casually,
    lovers, the images
    of saviors, books, the coin
    I carried in my pocket
    till it shone, it is
    all things lustered
    by the steady thoughtlessness
    of human use.

Human Wishes
    Â 
    Â 
    S PRING D RAWING
    A man thinks lilacs against white houses , having seen them in the farm country south of Tacoma in April, and can’t find his way to a sentence, a brushstroke carrying the energy of brush and stroke
    â€”as if he were stranded on the aureole of the memory of a woman’s breast,
    and she, after the drive from the airport and a chat with her mother and a shower, which is ritual cleansing and a passage through water to mark transition,
    had walked up the mountain on a summer evening.
    Away from, not toward. As if the garden roses were a little hobby of the dead. As if the deer pellets in the pale grass and the wavering moon and the rondure—as they used to say, upping the ante—of heaven
    were admirable completely, but only as common nouns of a plainer intention,