Load

Henry Hillier Parker

Load

Today we carried home the last brown sheaf

and hookt the scythe against the dry barn wall:

the yellow border's on the chestnut leaf,

the beech leaf's yellow all.

Tomorrow we must bring the apples in,

they are as big as they shall ever be:

already starlings ready to begin

have tasted many a tree.

And in the garden, all the roses done,

the light lies gently, faint and almost cold,

on wither'd goldenrod and snapdragon

and tarnisht marigold.

John Hewitt

It is too easy to forget what the seasons really mean. Food! For the mouth and heart and eyes. And the different work that this entails. There was a time when the earth was closer to my everyday experience. But I have lost contact in many ways. Is it strange to find it in words, in poetry? Now, when I am walking the paved streets, I remember how it used to be. My mother in the garden, pulling up bright orange carrots, purple beets, washing them clean. Shelling peas, blanching endive, slicing green beans – each vegetable in its time, and time a succession of vegetable events. I miss earth time. Clock time is my conductor now, and it’s not the same.

Thank goodness for poetry and memory.

“Today we carried home the last brown sheaf.”

“Tomorrow we must bring the apples in.”

Ballad of Another Ophelia

Emile Claus “Poultry in a Wood”

Ballad of Another Ophelia

Oh the green glimmer of apples in the orchard,

Lamps in a wash of rain!

Oh the wet walk of my brown hen through the stackyard,

Oh tears on the window pane!

Nothing now will ripen the bright green apples,

Full of disappointment and of rain,

Brackish they will taste, of tears, when the yellow dapples

Of autumn tell the withered tale again.

All round the yard it is cluck, my brown hen,

Cluck, and the rain-wet wings,

Cluck, my marigold bird, and again

Cluck for your yellow darlings.

For the grey rat found the gold thirteen

Huddled away in the dark,

Flutter for a moment, oh the beast is quick and keen,

Extinct one yellow-fluffy spark.

Once I had a lover bright like running water,

Once his face was laughing like the sky;

Open like the sky looking down in all its laughter

On the buttercups, and the buttercups was I.

What, then, is there hidden in the skirts of all the blossom?

What is peeping from your wings, oh mother hen?

’Tis the sun who asks the question, in a lovely haste for wisdom;

What a lovely haste for wisdom is in men!

Yea, but it is cruel when undressed is all the blossom,

And her shift is lying white upon the floor,

That a grey one, like a shadow, like a rat, a thief, a rain-storm,

Creeps upon her then and gathers in his store.

Oh the grey garner that is full of half-grown apples,

Oh the golden sparkles laid extinct!

And oh, behind the cloud-sheaves, like yellow autumn dapples,

Did you see the wicked sun that winked!

D.H. Lawrence

I've been wanting to add this poem for a while. But it's completely mad. Of course it is. Ophelia was mad. But who is this "other" Ophelia? It's a complete mystery to me. Why is it that I have no idea what is being said and still I like it? It's as if we can see through the eyes of a person who translates everything - apples, brown hen, rain, yellow bird, blossom, sun - into a strange paranoid sense of impending doom. I like that. It reminds me that my thoughts are often wildly inaccurate, coloured by emotion, and they close in on me. A poem like this reminds me that I can crawl out of the rabbit hole. 




  

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.

Paring the Apple

Brita Granstrom, "Boy Peeling Apples"

Paring the Apple

There are portraits and still-lifes.

And there is paring the apple.

And then? Paring it slowly,
From under cool-yellow
Cold-white emerging. And...?

The Spring of concentric peel
Unwinding off white,
The blade hidden, dividing.

There are portraits and still-lifes
And the first, because "human"
Does not excel the second, and
Neither is less weighted
With a human gesture, than paring the apple
With a human stillness.

The cool blade
Severs between coolness, apple-rind
Compelling a recognition.

Charles Tomlinson

Oh I like this one. So cleverly showing how our system of categories, of arranging things so that we feel we have a grasp of what they are and where they fit, well, it doesn't work. It doesn't cover all the subtleties, the idiosyncrasies, the distinctions. Here we have a portrait that has elements of still life, or, we could also say a still life with human qualities. I find it so intricate how Tomlinson talks about the knife dividing between things - paring and dividing are such human activities - showing how even as we separate and delineate objects, we reveal their likenesses and similarities. Without realizing it, we participate in a mysterious unifying and mirroring element, Even as we endeavor to classify and categorize and seek to understand, we step deeper into the mystery. Lovely to think about, if you ask me.

Just to be clear - I don't claim to know what a poem means, I merely enjoy it and make whatever sense of it comes to me. It's quite likely that I miss the point of it entirely. Some poet is laughing at me right now, or would be, if only they knew what I was writing here.

Applesauce

Mary Whyte, "Sister Heyward"

Applesauce

I liked how the starry blue lid

of that saucepan lifted and puffed,

then settled back on a thin

hotpad of steam, and the way

her kitchen filled with the warm

wet breath of apples, as if all

the apples were talking at once,

as if they'd come cold and sour

from chores in the orchard,

and were trying to shoulder in

close to the fire. She was too busy

to put in her two cent's worth

talking to apples. Squeezing

her dentures with wrinkly lips,

she had to jingle and stack

the bright brass coins of the lids

and thoughtfully count out

the red rubber rings, then hold

each jar, to see if it was clean,

to a window that looked out

through her back yard into Iowa.

And with every third or fourth jar

she wiped steam from her glasses,

using the hem of her apron,

printed with tiny red sailboats

that dipped along with leaf-green

banners snapping, under puffs

of pale applesauce clouds

scented with cinnamon and cloves,

the only boats under sail

for at least two thousand miles.

Ted Kooser

Cooking is a kind of poetry. And if you have the right ingredients in the poem - a grandmother, apples, (the scent of cooking apples and spices!), the sense of place and home with a hint of exotic travels, the practiced movements of one who works for love (motions that become almost holy by their intent), it's a dance, a rhythm, almost an elemental force. More than a poem by far.