Beneath thin red skin

is soft white flesh, both tart and sweet.

Locked within sleep tomorrow’s trees.

Round like worlds, clustered like galaxies­

cut them sideways to see stars within.

 

They hang in thousands through this thicket,

this old abandoned orchard

some forgotten homesteader dreamed

into life and left to run rampant

across this sloping ridge.

 

A dozen storm-bent parent trees still live­

Gravenstein or Spitzenberg, perhaps­

their apples dwarfing the small and twisted fruit

of the countless wild crabs that have sprung

from the orchard apples’ seeds.

 

That is the way of apples, always reverting

to wilder strains, no two entirely alike,

since apples are, like us, not true to seed.

 

Down the road, the neat and grafted groves

proclaim the sure profit of convention.

A sunburnt orchard man scythes back

the creeping progress of the thicket

against his trim and measured rows.

 

If you listen, he’ll explain the virtues

of grafting, of removing all sky-bound limbs,

warning that it is far easier to make a thicket

of a grove than a grove of a thicket.

But somewhere in his bones, he knows

the unknown in apples sleeps

within a few black kernels,

while from grafting nothing new can come.

 

If this alphabet were a clutch of seeds,

this page a new-turned soil, imagine

what might burst wild as spring seedlings

upon some fallow slope of the mind,

words budding in upland hollows

to bear strange new fruit and fill

our cups with strange dark ciders. . . .

 

Wild apples hang high above our heads.

In them, hear echoes of thunder, resonance

of rain. After sunset, come wander

through the night, and together we shall know

         words as wild apples,

         poems as flowering crabs.

 

From Wild Apples (Parallel Press, 2004).
Used with the author’s permission.