The Apple Trees at Olema Read Free Page A

the earth’s surface, has an external counterpart in the scouring
    movement of glaciers,
    and an internal one in the movement of grief
    which has something in it of the desert’s bareness
    and of its distances.
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    T HE B US TO B AEKDAM T EMPLE
    The freeway tracks the Han River, which flows
    west out of the mountains we are heading toward.
    This morning it is river-colored, gray-green,
    streaked with muddy gold, and swift. August,
    an overcast morning after rain, the sky one shade
    of pearl and the sheen of the roadside puddles
    is so empty it seems to steady the world
    like the posture of zealous young monks.
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    S ONG OF THE B ORDER G UARD
    When I sat in the square in Cuernavaca
    outside the Church of the Conquistador,
    wondering if Malinche had ever loved Cortés
    and watching the streams of people go by
    in their white shirts and blouses in the heat
    and the brightly colored cellophane papers
    in which small candies are wrapped and unwrapped
    being blown about in the slight breeze,
    what was all that racket in the trees?
    Boat-tailed grackles and white-winged doves.
    And in Houston in the park on a Sunday
    among the dragon kites and soccer balls
    and the families on picnics in the heat,
    not far from the Chapel of the Sacred Heart
    where Rothko had made that solemnity
    of stained glass windows for the suffering god
    in cardinal red and a sorrowing blue,
    what was louder than all the transistor radios?
    The hip-hop and mariachi? What was that racket in the trees?
    Boat-tailed grackles and white-winged doves.
    And in Waco in the riverside park along the Brazos
    where the city fathers might spend a little more money
    picking up the blown-about wrappers of fast food,
    even if it would constitute an activity of government,
    not far from the marker commemorating the founding
    of this city of Baptists by a Caribbean Jew who arrived
    from Jamaica on a riverboat, or from the Browning Chapel
    at Baylor where the words of two English poets
    are lit by the heat of the spring sun and the reds and blues
    of Arts & Crafts glass, what is that racket in the trees?
    Boat-tailed grackles and white-winged doves.
    And in San Antonio where Louisiana live oaks on the campus
    of the university are married to red brick in paradise
    and along the river that the Cozhuitlan people called Yanaguana
    where the Canary Island families settled with inducements
    by the Spanish crown, so that two hundred years later
    General Antonio López de Santa Anna crushed those Yankee insurgents
    and tax resisters at the old Pueblo of the Alamo
    or where, in the other telling, Travis and Bowie and Crockett,
    under the spindly cottonwoods, would not be brought to their knees.
    Cottonwood by the river, live oaks in the park and what is that racket?
    Boat-tailed grackles and white-winged doves.
    North of there the air changes a little and imperceptibly,
    in this valley or that, so the species of willow along the river
    change and the insects in the leaves and the size of fruit
    and the seeds scattered on the lawns of small towns
    with their statues of soldiers from the various wars
    are not so large and require different claws or beaks
    and you come to a place of mourning doves and Inca doves
    with their fluting coos and mute blackbirds with yellow eyes.
    So what is this business of walls and border guards?
    Who owns that country anyway? What was that racket in the trees?
    Ay-yi-yi-yi. Boat-tailed grackles and white-winged doves.
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    S EPTEMBER N OTEBOOK : S TORIES
    Everyone comes here from a long way off
    (is a line from a poem I read last night).
    Driving up 80 in the haze, they talked and talked.
    (Smoke in the air simmering from wildfires.)
    His story was sad and hers was roiled, troubled.
    Alternatively:
    A man and a woman, old friends, are in a theater
    watching a movie in which a man and a woman,
    old friends, are driving through summer on a mountain road.
    The woman is describing the end of her marriage
    and sobbing, shaking