In January 2005, I bought my wife a small Mexican lime tree and a smaller lemon tree for her birthday. The lime, spiked with long thorns, has doubled in size. The lemon has grown spindly. In Houston, both bear fruit in the fall, and both bore ample crops last year. The boys and I ate some of them right off the tree and the rest we kept to flavor our seltzer. This year, the lime tree is bare. The lemon bore two fruits, one of which my 3-year-old tore off the tree months ago. The other, mostly yellow but still marbled with green, is almost ripe. The acidic scent of both trees, even without flowers or fruit, attracts butterflies. Saturday morning, a large black-and-yellow swallowtail methodically worked it for more than an hour.
Based on his translation of “I limoni” (“The Lemon Trees”) by Eugenio Montale, included in Harry Thomas’ Montale in English, I want to read more by Lee Gerlach. In his brief note about Gerlach, who was born in 1920, Thomas says he is “a prolific poet and translator, unreasonably overlooked by publishers.” That’s enough to get my attention, plus the fact that Gerlach published his first book of poems, Highwater, in 2002, when he was 82. Though he grew up in Milwaukee, Gerlach has lived for 50 years in southern California, “a region whose topography rather closely resembles that of Liguria,” Thomas tells us. Here’s Gerlach’s version of “I limoni”:
“Hear me a moment. Laureate poets
seem to wander among plants
no one knows: boxwood, acanthus,
where nothing is alive to touch.
I prefer small streets that falter
into grassy ditches where a boy,
searching in the sinking puddles,
might capture a struggling eel.
The little path that winds down
along the slope plunges through cane-tufts
and opens suddenly into the orchard
among the moss-green trunks
of the lemon trees.
“Perhaps it is better
if the jubilee of small birds
dies down, swallowed in the sky,
yet more real to one who listens,
the murmur of tender leaves
in a breathless, unmoving air.
The senses are graced with an odor
filled with the earth.
It is like rain in a troubled breast,
sweet as an air that arrives
too suddenly and vanishes.
A miracle is hushed; all passions
are swept aside. Even the poor
know that richness,
the fragrance of the lemon trees.
“You realize that in silences
things yield and almost betray
their ultimate secrets.
At times, one half expects
to discover an error in Nature,
the still point of reality,
the missing link that will not hold,
the thread we cannot untangle
in order to get at the truth.
“You look around. Your mind seeks,
makes harmonies, falls apart
in the perfume, expands
when the day wearies away.
There are silences in which one watches
In every fading human shadow
Something divine let go.
“The illusion wanes, and in time we return
to our noisy cities where the blue
appears only in fragments
high up among the towering shapes.
Then rain leaching the earth.
Tedious, winter burdens the roofs,
And light is a miser, the soul bitter.
Yet, one day through an open gate,
among the green luxuriance of a yard,
the yellow lemons fire
and the heart melts,
and golden songs pour
into the breast
from the raised corners of the sun.”
I, a transplanted Northerner (like Gerlach), find this poem unspeakably beautiful. The first time I saw oranges and lemons growing on a tree I was 15 and visiting my aunt and uncle in Florida. The fruit, too colorful, too rounded and perfect, looked artificial, like a display in a department store window. My aunt had a lemon tree in the backyard. She picked lemons with the same casualness with which she folded sheets or set the table. To me it was magic. I remember my maternal grandmother, born in 1888 in central Pennsylvania, saying that for Christmas she and her sisters sometimes got a single orange each for Christmas, and it seemed to them like a miracle, as it does to me: “Your mind seeks,/makes harmonies, falls apart/in the perfume, expands/when the day wearies away.” What a sublime and uneasy pleasure it will be to eat that lone lemon.
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4 comments:
I grew up in South America, had an orange tree just ouside our house. Behind the tree were others and the majestic Andes as a backdrop, always purple and reliablee, gave me confidence. In Andalucia in the spring, the smell of orange blossoms permeates everything. My daughter was three when she carried an orange all day long, in every picture of that day, orange in one hand, a purple Teletubby on the other. A gypsy woman at the Alhambra that I'd politely refused didn't read my palm, watched my daughter fall and split her lip. But I glimpsed a look of regret on her face when I picked her up, her orange and Teletubby still on the ground, to comfort her. The smell lingered for about a year after I purchased essence of orange oil in Fez on that same trip. If you squeeze the skin of an orange and dab the juice on your lips, it makes them plump and lovely.
This is an astonishing poem and I'm grateful to you for posting it.
I remember being in a class of Lee Gerlach's at the University of San Diego in the late 80s. He told once of meeting Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeth after the war. Another time he let the class read a couple of his own poems, one of which began, "Let your brain alone," and went on to compare the mind to a potato lying dormant in a cellar. I knew he would one day win a wider audience for his work, and I trust that it will one day be still more widely known.
I studied under Lee Gerlach when I did my undergraduate work at USD in the late 70s and early 80s. I was like many young men in love with the sound of my own voice. Dr. Gerlach went to work right away on the task of showing me I didn't yet have one. When I first met with him in his office in my freshmen year I showed him the poems that my high school teachers thought were so good. He read them carefully. Then he handed them back. "Word games," he said. The next few years I toiled to write something he'd like. My goal was to get something published in the Pequod, a literary journal he published. When he didn't think anything I'd written was worthy of this I went to his office in frustration and obvious hurt. His manner was something like a zen master; his indifference to my emotion was complete. "What can I do?," I blurted out. "Get a life, and then you can write about it."
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