The Apple Trees at Olema Read Free

incurious,
    but he has his work. It is he who decides
    which limbs get lopped off
    in the city of the dead.
    You can fall a long way in sunlight.
    You can fall a long way in the rain.
    The ones who don’t take the old white horse
    take the evening train.
    4.
    Today his body is consigned to the flames
    and I begin to understand why people
    would want to carry a body to the river’s edge
    and build a platform of wood and burn it
    in the wind and scatter the ashes in the river.
    As if to say, take him, fire, take him, air,
    and, river, take him. Downstream. Downstream.
    Watch the ashes disappear in the fast water
    or, in a small flaring of anger, turn away, walk back
    toward the markets and the hum of life, not quite
    saying to yourself There, the hell with it, it’s done.
    I said to him once, when he’d gotten into some scrape
    or other, “You know, you have the impulse control
    of a ferret.” And he said, “Yeah? I don’t know
    what a ferret is, but I get greedy. I don’t mean to,
    but I get greedy.” An old grubber’s beard, going gray,
    a wheelchair, sweats, a street person’s baseball cap.
    â€œI’ve been thinking about Billie Holiday, you know
    if she were around now, she ’d be nothing. You know
    what I mean? Hip-hop? Never. She had to be born
    at a time when they were writing the kind of songs
    and people were listening to the kind of songs
    she was great at singing.” And I would say,
    â€œYou just got evicted from your apartment,
    you can’t walk and you have no money, so
    I don’t want to talk to you about Billie Holiday
    right now, okay.” And he would say, “You know,
    I’m like Mom. I mean, she really had a genius
    for denial, don’t you think? And the thing is,
    you know, she was a pretty happy person.”
    And I would say, “She was not a happy person.
    She was panicky, crippled by guilt at her drinking,
    and she was evasive to herself about herself,
    and so she couldn’t actually connect with anybody,
    and her only defense was to be chronically cheerful.”
    And he would say, “Worse things than cheerful.”
    Well, I am through with those arguments,
    except in my head, and not through, I see, with the habit—
    I thought this poem would end downriver downriver—
    of worrying about where you are and how you’re doing.
    Â 
    Â 
    V ARIATIONS ON A P ASSAGE IN E DWARD A BBEY
    A dune begins with an obstacle—a stone, a shrub, a log,
    anything heavy enough to resist being moved by wind.
    This obstacle forms a wind shadow on its leeward side,
    making eddies in the currents, now fast, now slow, of the air,
    exactly as a rock in a stream causes an eddy in the water.
    Within the eddy the wind moves with less force and less velocity
    than the airstreams on either side, creating what geologists call
    the surface of discontinuity. And it is here that the wind
    tends to drop part of its load of sand. The sand particles,
    which hop or bounce along the earth before the wind,
    begin to accumulate,
    creating a greater eddy in the air currents
    and capturing still more sand.
    It’s thus a dune is formed.
    viewed in cross section, sand dunes display a characteristic profile.
    on the windward side the angle of ascent is low and gradual—
    twenty to twenty-five degrees from the horizontal. on the leeward side
    the slope is much steeper, usually about thirty-four degrees—
    the angle of repose of sand and most other loose materials.
    The steep side of the dune is called the slip face
    because of the slides
    that occur as sand is driven up the windward side
    and deposited on or just over the crest.
    The weight of the crest
    eventually becomes greater than can be supported by the sand beneath,
    so the extra sand slumps down the slip face
    and the whole dune
    advances in the direction of the prevailing wind, until some obstacle
    like a mountain intervenes.
    This movement, this grand slow march
    across