The Apple Trees at Olema

Contents

July Notebook: The Birds

Sleep like the down elevator’s

In front of me six African men, each of them tall

They are built like exclamation points, woodpeckers.

Are you there? It’s summer. Are you smeared with the juice of cherries?

After Coleridge and for Milosz: Late July

For C.R.: What do you mean you have nothing?

Late afternoons in June the fog rides in

August Notebook: A Death

1. River Bicycle Peony

2. Sudden and Grateful Memory of Mississippi John Hurt

3. You can fall a long way in sunlight

4. Today his body is consigned to the flames

Variations on a Passage in Edward Abbey

The Bus to Baekdam Temple

Song of the Border Guard

September Notebook: Stories

Everyone comes from a long way off

Driving up 80 in the haze, they talked and talked.

He found that it was no good trying to tell

Names for involuntary movements of the body—

The receptionist at the hospital morgue told him

Setup without the punchline:

Once there were two sisters called Knock Me and Sock Me;

“Why?” he asked. “Because she was lonely,

It is good to sit down to birthday cake

Stories about the distribution of wealth:

How Eldie Got Her Name

Punchline without the setup:

He had known, as long as he’d known anything,

Because she, not her sister, answered the door,

She looked beautiful, and looked her age, too.

Two jokes walk into a bar.

In the other world the girls were named Eleanor and Filina,

Some of David’s Story

The Red Chinese Dragon and the Shadows on Her Body in the Moonlight

From Field Guide

On the Coast near Sausalito

Adhesive: For Earlene

Bookbuying in the Tenderloin

Palo Alto: The Marshes

Concerning the Afterlife, the Indians of Central California Had Only the Dimmest Notions

The Nineteenth Century as a Song

Applications of the Doctrine

Meditation at Lagunitas

The Yellow Bicycle

Against Botticelli

Like Three Fair Branches from One Root Deriv’d

Transparent Garments

The Garden of Delight

The Origin of Cities

Winter Morning in Charlottesville

Emblems of a Prior Order

Child Naming Flowers

Picking Blackberries with a Friend Who Has Been Reading Jacques Lacan

The Beginning of September

Not Going to New York: A Letter

Songs to Survive the Summer

From Human Wishes

Spring Drawing 2

The Harbor at Seattle

A Story About the Body

The Apple Trees at Olema

Misery and Splendor

Santa Barbara Road

Berkeley Eclogue

Privilege of Being

Natural Theology

Tahoe in August

Between the Wars

From Sun Under Wood

Our Lady of the Snows

Dragonflies Mating

My Mother’s Nipples

The Gardens of Warsaw

Notes on “Layover”

The Woods in New Jersey

Iowa City: Early April

A Note on “Iowa City: Early April”

Forty Something

Shame: An Aria

Regalia for a Black Hat Dancer

Frida Kahlo: In the Saliva

English: An Ode

The Seventh Night

Interrupted Meditation

From Time and Materials

Envy of Other People’s Poems

A Supple Wreath of Myrtle

Futures in Lilacs

Three Dawn Songs in Summer

The Distribution of Happiness

The Problem of Describing Color

The Problem of Describing Trees

Winged and Acid Dark

A Swarm of Dawns, a Flock of Restless Noons

Breach and Orison

The World as Will and Representation

After the Winds

For Czesław Miłosz in Kraków

Time and Materials

Domestic Interiors

Czesław Miłosz: In Memoriam

Horace: Three Imitations

State of the Planet

Poem with a Cucumber in It

Drift and Vapor (Surf Faintly)

“…White of Forgetfulness, White of Safety”

I Am Your Waiter Tonight and My Name Is Dmitri

The Dry Mountain Air

First Things at the Last Minute

Mouth Slightly Open

Old Movie with the Sound Turned Off

Ezra Pound’s Proposition

On Visiting the DMZ at Panmunjon: A Haibun

Exit, Pursued by a Sierra Meadow

September, Inverness

Notes and Acknowledgments

About the Author

Other Books by Robert Hass

About the Publisher