The Apple Trees at Olema Read Online Free PDF

the house.
    His son had answered the door, the three of them
    had coffee in the kitchen and talked about the play.
    His wife said not much and he concentrated
    on ignoring her anger and the devastating sorrow
    welling up inside him. Going through the house,
    they’d had no issues except for one bowl
    that they’d both remembered being the one
    to spot in an antique store on the Mendocino road
    twenty years before when they were quite poor
    and the bowl, earthy, a luminous brown-gold,
    from a famous ceramist’s studio in Cornwall,
    had been a plunge. (They’d made love
    in the upstairs room of a bed-and-breakfast,
    he involuntarily remembered, with an ocean view
    and at breakfast they had heard Pachelbel’s canon
    for the first time with its stunned, slow, stately beauty
    and went walking to look for coastal flowers,
    lupine and heal-all and vetch, to fill the bowl with,
    and then somehow bickered away through the afternoon
    while they walked on the storm-littered beach.)
    His wife looked at it a long time, arms crossed,
    and then shrugged forcefully as if to say, take it
    if you want it, since you’ve taken everything else,
    and so, nettled by what he thought
    was passive-aggressive in her manner, he had.
    Later he found there wasn’t a way to describe
    to his lover or to his friends the moment
    when he turned to his wife to say, again,
    how sorry he was, and how she had seen it
    coming and raised a palm and said, “Please, don’t,”
    and how his son had walked him to the door
    and how, sitting in the car outside his house
    of many years while his son disappeared inside,
    he’d felt unable to move, stuck in some deep well
    of dry sorrow, staring at the cold early blossoms
    of the plum trees and at the carelessly lovely look
    of the gardens his neighbors had, in the West Coast way,
    labored over, until shame made him start the car
    and drive it to the airport. Home again, in his new apartment
    on the other side of the continent, fumbling
    for his key in the humid night, he almost tripped
    over the cat that came bounding out of the shadows
    to greet him. It belonged to his new neighbor,
    a professor of philosophy who’d written a book
    about lying which he had tried to read
    when he was sorting out the evasions and outright lies
    his infidelity entailed. The cat was named Cat
    and it was blind. It was rubbing its gray flank
    against his ankles and purring, looking up at him
    and purring and winking its occluded, milky eyes.
    She opened the door before he did. She had put on
    one of his shirts and was warm and smelled of sleep.
    He scooped up the cat and tossed it in the hall
    And then he hugged her. When she asked him, only half-awake,
    how it had gone, he ’d said, “Fine. Not easy.”
    and she had touched his cheek and said, “Poor baby”
    and padded down the hall and back to bed.
    A few nights later, after they’d made love,
    he dozed and woke thinking about his son.
    They had tossed off the sheets in the warm room
    and when he glanced aside he was startled
    to see that her body, curled naked beside him,
    lustrous in the moonlight, was crisscrossed
    with black shadows from the blinds. His body too.
    It made them, made everything, seem vulnerable.
    There was a light still on in the kitchen, and he slipped
    from bed and walked down the hall to turn it off.
    They’d also left the TV on, soldiers in desert camouflage
    leaning against a wall. He turned that off, too,
    and walked back down the hall, climbed into bed,
    covered them both, lay down, and listened to the rhythm
    of her breathing. After a while he entered it and slept.

Field Guide
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    O N THE C OAST NEAR S AUSALITO
    1.
    I won’t say much for the sea,
    except that it was, almost,
    the color of sour milk.
    The sun in that clear
    unmenacing sky was low,
    angled off the gray fissure of the cliffs,
    hills dark green with manzanita.
    Low tide: slimed rocks
    mottled brown and thick with