The Apple Trees at Olema Read Online Free PDF Page B

kelp
    merged with the gray stone
    of the breakwater, sliding off
    to antediluvian depths.
    The old story: here filthy life begins.
    2.
    Fish—
    ing, as Melville said,
    â€œto purge the spleen,”
    to put to task my clumsy hands
    my hands that bruise by
    not touching
    pluck the legs from a prawn,
    peel the shell off,
    and curl the body twice about a hook.
    3.
    The cabezone is not highly regarded
    by fishermen, except Italians
    who have the grace
    to fry the pale, almost bluish flesh
    in olive oil with a sprig
    of fresh rosemary.
    The cabezone, an ugly atavistic fish,
    as old as the coastal shelf
    it feeds upon
    has fins of duck’s-web thickness,
    resembles a prehistoric toad,
    and is delicately sweet.
    Catching one, the fierce quiver of surprise
    and the line ’s tension
    are a recognition.
    4.
    But it’s strange to kill
    for the sudden feel of life.
    The danger is
    to moralize
    that strangeness.
    Holding the spiny monster in my hands
    his bulging purple eyes
    were eyes and the sun was
    almost tangent to the planet
    on our uneasy coast.
    Creature and creature,
    we stared down centuries.
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    F ALL
    Amateurs, we gathered mushrooms
    near shaggy eucalyptus groves
    which smelled of camphor and the fog-soaked earth.
    Chanterelles, puffballs, chicken of the woods,
    we cooked in wine or butter,
    beaten eggs or sour cream,
    half-expecting to be
    killed by a mistake. “Intense perspiration,”
    you said late at night,
    quoting the terrifying field guide
    while we lay tangled in our sheets and heavy limbs,
    â€œis the first symptom of attack.”
    Friends called our aromatic fungi
    liebestoads and only ate the ones
    that we most certainly survived.
    Death shook us more than once
    those days and floating back
    it felt like life. Earth-wet, slithery,
    we drifted toward the names of things.
    Spore prints littered our table
    like nervous stars. Rotting caps
    gave off a musky smell of loam.
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    M APS
    Sourdough French bread and pinot chardonnay
    Apricots—
    the downy buttock shape
    hard black sculpture of the limbs
    on Saratoga hillsides in the rain.
    These were the staples of the China trade:
    sea otter, sandalwood, and bêche-de-mer
    The pointillist look of laurels
    their dappled pale green body stirs
    down valley in the morning wind
    Daphne was supple
    my wife is tan, blue-rippled
    pale in the dark hollows
    Kit Carson in California:
    it was the eyes of fish
    that shivered in him the tenderness of eyes
    he watched the ships come in
    at Yerba Buena once, found obscene
    the intelligence of crabs
    their sidelong crawl, gulls
    screeching for white meat,
    flounders in tubs, startled
    Musky fall—
    slime of a saffron milkcap
    the mottled amanita
    delicate phallic toxic
    How odd
    the fruity warmth of zinfandel
    geometries of “rational viticulture”
    Plucked from algae sea spray
    cold sun and a low rank tide
    sea cucumbers
    lolling in the crevices of rock
    they traded men enough
    to carve old Crocker’s railway out of rock
    to eat these slugs
    bêche-de-mer
    The night they bombed Hanoi
    we had been drinking red pinot
    that was winter the walnut tree was bare
    and the desert ironwood where waxwings
    perched in spring drunk on pyracantha
    squalls headwinds days gone
    north on the infelicitous Pacific
    The bleak intricate erosion of these cliffs
    seas grown bitter
    with the salt of continents
    Jerusalem artichokes
    raised on sandy bluffs at San Gregorio
    near reedy beaches where the steelhead ran
    Coast range runoff turned salt creek
    in the heat and indolence of August
    That purple in the hills
    owl’s clover stiffening the lupine
    while the white flowers of the pollinated plant
    seep red
    the eye owns what is familiar
    felt along the flesh
    â€œan amethystine tinge”
    Chants, recitations:
    Olema
    Tamalpais Mariposa
    Mendocino Sausalito San Rafael
    Emigrant Gap
    Donner Pass
    of all the laws
    that bind us to the past
    the names of things are
    stubbornest
    Late