A Short History of the Apple

Ger Stallenberg

A Short History of the Apple

Teeth at the skin. Anticipation.
Then flesh. Grain on the tongue.
Eve’s knees ground in the dirt
of paradise. Newton watching
gravity happen. The history
of apples in each starry core,
every papery chamber’s bright
bitter seed. Woody stem
an infant tree. William Tell
and his lucky arrow. Orchards
of the Fertile Crescent. Bushels.
Fire blight. Scab and powdery mildew.
Cedar apple rust. The apple endures.
Born of the wild rose, of crab ancestors.
The first pip raised in Kazakhstan.
Snow White with poison on her lips.
The buried blades of Halloween.
Budding and grafting. John Chapman
in his tin pot hat. Oh Westward
Expansion. Apple pie. American
as. Hard cider. Winter banana.
Melt-in-the-mouth made sweet
by hives of Britain’s honeybees:
white man’s flies. O eat. O eat.

Dorianne Laux 

A list. Just so you know, lists can be beautiful, can be poems.

Stone Speech

Neb

Stone Speech

Crowding this beach
are milkstones, white
teardrops; flints
edged out of flinthood
into smoothness chafe
against grainy ovals,
pitted pieces, nosestones,
stoppers and saddles;
veins of orange
inlay black beads:
chalk-swaddled babyshapes,
tiny fists, facestones
and facestone's brother
skullstone, roundheads
pierced by a single eye,
purple finds, all
rubbing shoulders:
a mob of grindings,
groundlings, scatterings
from a million necklaces
mined under sea-hills, the pebbles
are as various as the people.

Charles Tomlinson

Poetry brings together, connects. Here, Tomlinson uses words that describe humans to describe stones. Noses, faces, skulls, babies, brothers, shoulders, eyes, heads, fists. It makes me wonder - does this show that humans are like stones, or that stones are like humans? Or is it that there is an underlying truth tying both stones and humans together? And if this is "stone speech", what are the stones saying? 



 

 

Villanelle for a Season's End

Andrew Wyeth

Villanelle for a Season's End

Autumn is here, and summer will not stay.
The season cuts a bloodline on the land,
And all earth’s singing green is stripped away.
Your leaving drains the color from the day.
The oak leaves’ red is clotting in my hand.
Autumn is here, and summer will not stay.
The sea fog settles. Even noon is gray.
The light recedes as though this dusk were planned.
The green of field and tree has slipped away.
I shiver on the beach and watch the way
The berries’ blood is spilled along the sand.
Autumn is here, and summer will not stay.
In the chill air the knotted weed heads sway.
The waves have swept your footprints from the sand.
The green of all our fields is stripped away.
See how the wind has scattered the salt hay
Across the dunes! Too well I understand:
Autumn is here, bright summer will not stay,
And all earth’s love and green are stripped away. 

Luci Shaw 

For those with a melancholic streak, Autumn gives that satisfying mix of beauty and loss to mull over, even savour. I especially appreciate how Luci Shaw writes of the colour draining from the landscape, how the vividness and delineation of things dulls and greys. How we go from singing green to clotting red and foggy grey. And those telling words - "stripped, clotting, slipped, spilled, knotted, scattered, swept" - that sensation of being bereft, of needing to pull one's coat closer around one, is expressed exquisitely.






 

To the Light of September

Annie Soudain

To the Light of September

When you are already here

you appear to be only

a name that tells of you

whether you are present or not

and for now it seems as though

you are still summer

still the high familiar

endless summer

yet with a glint

of bronze in the chill mornings

and the late yellow petals

of the mullein fluttering

on the stalks that lean

over their broken

shadows across the cracked ground

but they all know

that you have come

the seed heads of the sage

the whispering birds

with nowhere to hide you

to keep you for later

you

who fly with them

you who are neither

before nor after

you who arrive

with blue plums

that have fallen through the night

perfect in the dew

W.S. Merwin


I like how the poem is addressed to the light as if it were a person. "For now it seems as though you are still summer...But they all know that you have come." And isn't it true? I was sitting in the sun this afternoon and for a moment it could've been August. But even though the leaves haven't turned, there's an unmistakable feeling in the air. It's no longer summer. You have arrived. 




 

A Day in Autumn

Oleg Kozak

A Day in Autumn

It will not always be like this, 
The air windless, a few last 
Leaves adding their decoration 
To the trees’ shoulders, braiding the cuffs 
Of the boughs with gold; a bird preening

In the lawn’s mirror. Having looked up 
From the day’s chores, pause a minute, 
Let the mind take its photograph 
Of the bright scene, something to wear 
Against the heart in the long cold.

R.S. Thomas

"It will not always be like this..." now there's a line that can either depress or encourage. I think I've used it a lot in the encouraging sense in the past few years, but this summer - this summer was golden, and I knew that line in its "seize the day" sense, in that "wish I could hold this moment forever". So this poem is exactly what I want. Yes, store the moments away, layer on layer, leaf on golden leaf, for heart-warmth in the long cold. The long cold. What a beautiful way to say it. 

 

from A Prayer for the Past

Sampo Kaikkonen

from A Prayer for the Past

All sights and sounds of day and year,

All groups and forms, each leaf and gem,

Are thine, O God, nor will I fear

To talk to thee of them.

Too great thy heart is to despise,

Whose day girds centuries about;

From things which we name small, thine eyes

See great things looking out.

Therefore the prayerful song I sing

May come to thee in ordered words:

Though lowly born, it needs not cling

In terror to its chords.

I think that nothing made is lost;

That not a moon has ever shone,

That not a cloud my eyes hath crossed

But to my soul is gone.

That all the lost years garnered lie

In this thy casket, my dim soul;

And thou wilt, once, the key apply,

And show the shining whole.

George Macdonald 

"Nothing made is lost." 

One of the most comforting lines in a poem. Just think, that dandelion, that beetle, that mouse - all creatures and creation - not one thing lost or forgotten or overlooked, everything with meaning and purpose and worth. Nothing disposable, everything essential, every bit indispensable individually and to the whole. Is it possible? Is it really possible? 

Yes.

 

The Sea

Edward Henry Potthast

The Sea

To step over the low wall that divides 
Road from concrete walk above the shore 
Brings sharply back something known long before— 
The miniature gaiety of seasides. 
Everything crowds under the low horizon: 
Steep beach, blue water, towels, red bathing caps, 
The small hushed waves’ repeated fresh collapse 
Up the warm yellow sand, and further off 
A white steamer stuck in the afternoon—

Still going on, all of it, still going on! 
To lie, eat, sleep in hearing of the surf 
(Ears to transistors, that sound tame enough 
Under the sky), or gently up and down 
Lead the uncertain children, frilled in white 
And grasping at enormous air, or wheel 
The rigid old along for them to feel 
A final summer, plainly still occurs 
As half an annual pleasure, half a rite,

As when, happy at being on my own, 
I searched the sand for Famous Cricketers, 
Or, farther back, my parents, listeners 
To the same seaside quack, first became known. 
Strange to it now, I watch the cloudless scene: 
The same clear water over smoothed pebbles, 
The distant bathers’ weak protesting trebles 
Down at its edge, and then the cheap cigars, 
The chocolate-papers, tea-leaves, and, between

The rocks, the rusting soup-tins, till the first 
Few families start the trek back to the cars. 
The white steamer has gone. Like breathed-on glass 
The sunlight has turned milky. If the worst 
Of flawless weather is our falling short, 
It may be that through habit these do best, 
Coming to the water clumsily undressed 
Yearly; teaching their children by a sort 
Of clowning; helping the old, too, as they ought.

Philip Larkin

"Still going on, all of it! Still going on!" So true. The people and the beach are always the same. No matter what year, it continues in the same way. The water, the waves, the sun, the people. I have my memories, and I make more. What a golden summer it has been! 

 

Harmonica Humdrums

Maurice Sapiro, "Gold on the Water"

Harmonica Humdrums

And so the days pass

and so we drift and dawdle.

Bright stood the mountains,

brighter loomed the sea.

And so the nights go on

and so we flash and fade.

Green lay the hills,

greener a river evening.

Stones wore gray lichen

and trees a moon mist.

And so the gold be gone.

And so the harm be ashes.

First moved the the moonrise.

Later dropped the moondown.

Handy shoved the dawn.

Handydandy shone the sun.

Carl Sandburg

"And so we flash and fade..." that phrase calls up so many things - "Our days on earth are like grass, like wildflowers we bloom and die." Psalm 103: 17. And Sandburg is a master of mood-setting, layer on layer he sets it down, like a painter. Colour repetition: green, gray, gold - word repetition: "And so", "And so", "And so". It's a strange half-sad, half-optimistic poem. Sandburg is like that, confident, ebullient, yet somehow haunting. That, "And so the gold be gone. And so the harm be ashes." strikes me as regretful but strong and optimistic -things are changing, time is passing, and the bad in it as well. I find that a comforting thought.