Words, Celebration

Late afternoons in June the fog rides in
across the ridge of pines, ghosting them,
and settling on the bay to give a muted gray
luster to the last hours of light and take back
what we didn't know at midday we'd experience
as lack: the blue of summer and the dry spiced scent
of the summer woods. It's as if some cold salt god
had wandered inland for a nap. You still see
herons fishing in the shallows, a kingfisher or an osprey
emerges for a moment out of the high, drifting mist,
then vanishes again. And the soft, light green leaves
of the thimbleberry and the ridged coffeeberry leaves
and the needles of the redwoods and pines look more sprightly
in the cool gray air with the long dusk coming on,
since fog is their natural element. I had it in mind
that this description of the weather would be a way
to say things comes and go, a way of subsuming
the rhythms of arrival and departure to a sense
of how brief the time is on a summer afternoon
when the sun is warm on your neck and the world
might as well be a dog sleeping on a porch, or a child
for whom an afternoon is endless, endless. Time:
thick honey, and no one saying goodbye.

*

What do you mean you have nothing?
You can't have nothing. Aren't there three green apples
on the table in an earth-brown bowl? Weren't there
three apples for three goddesses in the story
and the fellow had to pick - no, there was one apple
and three goddesses, as in the well-known remark
that all of politics is two pieces of cake
and three children. Anre't there three yellow roses
on the counter in a clear glass vase among purple spikes
of another flower that resembles a little
the Nile hyacinth you saw in lush borders
along the green canal at Puerto Escondido?

Do you remember Juan called them "Lent flowers,"
which made you see that the white gush of the calyx
was an eastering, and you looked at Connie
with her shaved head after chemo and her bright,
wide eyes that wanted to miss nothing,
and do you remember that the surface of the water
came suddently alive: a violent rolling and leaping
of small fish, and Juan, pointing into the water
at what had got them leaping, shouted "Barracuda,"
and that the young pelicans came swooping in
to practice their new awkward skill of fishing
on the small, terrified, silvery river fish? And
the black-headed terns, a flock of them,
joined in, hovering, and plunging like needles
into the churning water? All in one explosion:
green lagoon, barracuda, silver fish, brown pelicans,
plunging terns, Juan's laugh, appalled, alive,
and Connie's wide blue eyes and the river smell
coming up as the water quieted again. Of course,
there were three apples, one for beauty,
and one for terror, and one for Connie's eyes
in the quiet after,  mangrove swallows in the air,
shy, white-faced ibises foraging among the hyacinths.

--Robert Hass
poems from "The Apple Trees at Olema"