Read Online The Apple Trees at Olema by Robert Hass - Free Book Online
Authors: Robert Hass
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and brilliant lust among the gods.
These are amusements. She dances, the ships go forth,
slaves and peasants labor in the fields, maimed soldiers
ape monkeys for coins outside the wineshops,
the craftsmen work in bronze and gold, accounts
are kept carefully, what goes out, what returns.
Â
Â
W INTER M ORNING IN C HARLOTTESVILLE
Lead skies
and gothic traceries of poplar.
In the sacrament of winter
Savonarola raged against the carnal word.
Inside the prism of that eloquence
even Botticelli renounced the bestial gods
and beauty.
Florentine vanity
gathers in the dogwood buds.
How sexual
this morning is the otherwise
quite plain
white-crowned sparrowâs
plumed head!
By a natural
selection, the word
originates its species,
the blood flowers,
republics scrawl their hurried declarations
& small birds scavenge
in the chaste late winter grass.
Â
Â
O LD D OMINION
The shadows of late afternoon and the odors
of honeysuckle are a congruent sadness.
Everything is easy but wrong. I am walking
across thick lawns under maples in borrowed tennis whites.
It is like the photographs of Randall Jarrell
I stared at on the backs of books in college.
He looked so sad and relaxed in the pictures.
He was translating Chekhov and wore tennis whites.
It puzzled me that in his art, like Chekhovâs,
everyone was lost, that the main chance was never seized
because it is only there as a thing to be dreamed of
or because someone somewhere had set the old words
to the old tune: we live by habit and it doesnât hurt.
Now the thwack ⦠thwack of tennis balls being hit
reaches me and it is the first sound of an ax
in the cherry orchard or the sound of machine guns
where the young terrorists are exploding
among poor people on the streets of Los Angeles.
I begin making resolutions: to take risks, not to stay
in the south, to somehow do honor to Randall Jarrell,
never to kill myself. Through the oaks I see the courts,
the nets, the painted boundaries, and the people in tennis
whites who look so graceful from this distance.
Â
Â
M ONTICELLO
Snow is falling
on the age of reason, on Tom Jeffersonâs
little hill & on the age of sensibility.
Jane Austen isnât walking in the park,
she considers that this gray crust
of an horizon will not do;
she is by the fire, reading William Cowper,
and Jefferson, if he isnât dead,
has gone down to Kmart
to browse among the gadgets:
pulleys, levers, the separation of powers.
I try to think of history: the mammoth
jawbone in the entry hall,
Napoléon in marble,
Meriwether Lewis dead at Grinderâs Trace.
I donât want the powers separated,
one wing for Governor Randolph when he comes,
the other wing for love,
private places
in the public weal
that ache against the teeth like ice.
outside this monument, the snow
catches, star-shaped,
in the vaginal leaves of old magnolias.
Â
Â
E MBLEMS OF A P RIOR O RDER
(For Louise)
Patient cultivation,
as the white petals of
the climbing rose
were to some man
a lifetimeâs careful work,
the mess of petals
on the lawn was bred
to fall there as a dog
is bred to standâ
gardens are a history
of art, this fin de siècle
flower & Dobermannâs
pinscher, all deadly
sleekness in the neighborâs
yard, were born, brennende
liebe , under the lindens
that bear the morning
toward us on a silver tray.
Â
Â
W EED
Horse is Lorcaâs word, fierce as wind,
or melancholy, gorgeous, Andalusian:
white horse grazing near the river dust;
and parsnip is hopeless,
second cousin to the rhubarb
which is already second cousin
to an apple pie. Marrying the words
to the coarse white umbels sprouting
on the first of May is history
but conveys nothing; it is not the veined
body of Queen Anneâs lace
I found, bored, in a spring classroom
from which I walked hands tingling
for the breasts that are meadows in New Jersey
in 1933; it
These are amusements. She dances, the ships go forth,
slaves and peasants labor in the fields, maimed soldiers
ape monkeys for coins outside the wineshops,
the craftsmen work in bronze and gold, accounts
are kept carefully, what goes out, what returns.
Â
Â
W INTER M ORNING IN C HARLOTTESVILLE
Lead skies
and gothic traceries of poplar.
In the sacrament of winter
Savonarola raged against the carnal word.
Inside the prism of that eloquence
even Botticelli renounced the bestial gods
and beauty.
Florentine vanity
gathers in the dogwood buds.
How sexual
this morning is the otherwise
quite plain
white-crowned sparrowâs
plumed head!
By a natural
selection, the word
originates its species,
the blood flowers,
republics scrawl their hurried declarations
& small birds scavenge
in the chaste late winter grass.
Â
Â
O LD D OMINION
The shadows of late afternoon and the odors
of honeysuckle are a congruent sadness.
Everything is easy but wrong. I am walking
across thick lawns under maples in borrowed tennis whites.
It is like the photographs of Randall Jarrell
I stared at on the backs of books in college.
He looked so sad and relaxed in the pictures.
He was translating Chekhov and wore tennis whites.
It puzzled me that in his art, like Chekhovâs,
everyone was lost, that the main chance was never seized
because it is only there as a thing to be dreamed of
or because someone somewhere had set the old words
to the old tune: we live by habit and it doesnât hurt.
Now the thwack ⦠thwack of tennis balls being hit
reaches me and it is the first sound of an ax
in the cherry orchard or the sound of machine guns
where the young terrorists are exploding
among poor people on the streets of Los Angeles.
I begin making resolutions: to take risks, not to stay
in the south, to somehow do honor to Randall Jarrell,
never to kill myself. Through the oaks I see the courts,
the nets, the painted boundaries, and the people in tennis
whites who look so graceful from this distance.
Â
Â
M ONTICELLO
Snow is falling
on the age of reason, on Tom Jeffersonâs
little hill & on the age of sensibility.
Jane Austen isnât walking in the park,
she considers that this gray crust
of an horizon will not do;
she is by the fire, reading William Cowper,
and Jefferson, if he isnât dead,
has gone down to Kmart
to browse among the gadgets:
pulleys, levers, the separation of powers.
I try to think of history: the mammoth
jawbone in the entry hall,
Napoléon in marble,
Meriwether Lewis dead at Grinderâs Trace.
I donât want the powers separated,
one wing for Governor Randolph when he comes,
the other wing for love,
private places
in the public weal
that ache against the teeth like ice.
outside this monument, the snow
catches, star-shaped,
in the vaginal leaves of old magnolias.
Â
Â
E MBLEMS OF A P RIOR O RDER
(For Louise)
Patient cultivation,
as the white petals of
the climbing rose
were to some man
a lifetimeâs careful work,
the mess of petals
on the lawn was bred
to fall there as a dog
is bred to standâ
gardens are a history
of art, this fin de siècle
flower & Dobermannâs
pinscher, all deadly
sleekness in the neighborâs
yard, were born, brennende
liebe , under the lindens
that bear the morning
toward us on a silver tray.
Â
Â
W EED
Horse is Lorcaâs word, fierce as wind,
or melancholy, gorgeous, Andalusian:
white horse grazing near the river dust;
and parsnip is hopeless,
second cousin to the rhubarb
which is already second cousin
to an apple pie. Marrying the words
to the coarse white umbels sprouting
on the first of May is history
but conveys nothing; it is not the veined
body of Queen Anneâs lace
I found, bored, in a spring classroom
from which I walked hands tingling
for the breasts that are meadows in New Jersey
in 1933; it
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