Midnight Apple Picking
In the harsh despondency of night,
When tears have dived into their sepulchers
And the mists, heavy with every defeat
Have exited the scene, leaving
The thick black, which has coated
The red apples hung aloft like lost dreams
Waiting to be plucked.
The floor is coated with the corpses of Eve’s first sin
And memories, long anchored, rise like
Cumbersome whales of deep-tide sadness
For air,
For the fresh breath of surface tranquility.
This year of grief, of fresh pink screams
Has shotgunned through the fragile cadences of hope.
But here in the midst of the midnight hour
With my girlfriend and dog, I catch
The apples doused silver by the moon –
Samurai sword sliced in half, expertly
With clinical precision
With my bucket, frightened
I’ll do a Newton and know the concussion of stars.
In these moments I know love.
Its fragile body of flame
Still burns in the dark of the deepest winter
And even though the hole left by your premature departure
Can never be filled with the notes of soft tears,
I hold the hand of childhood promises made flesh
Thinking on the always uncertain future.
For Amelia
Let sorrows ripe and devouring
depart with the sun
descending below the
pigeon smudged rooftops
and the children weary,
red coated by
evening fall,
are catapulted through
joy’s essence;
tumid with the
moon’s nameless desires.
Lying upon the newly
sprung grass of spring,
Amelia sits upon my back,
and with fake anger I cry
‘I’m not a chair’
but with a disconcerting honesty
she looks at me and demands,
‘well what are you then?’
I am silenced;
the philosophies collected
in my now faltering youth
sink into nothingness,
and I can only
shrug and say simply,
‘I don’t know’,
like a teacher
she nods sagely
and without being told I get
onto my hands and knees;
she climbs onto my back
and we begin to traverse
the front garden unexplored
during this day of beers and babies
and petty parental judgements.
She clings to my collar
and for the first time in months
I reach an equilibrium denied me
in the waged hours which
dictate even the days unbound
by their measurements of worth.
As we sojourn across
natures domesticated self,
the adults drink and talk
wearily of joys passed or passing.
We find a worm,
fat and half sunken
into the black earth.
We stare and watch,
as you wonder
in your fractured tongue
where it is going,
and why it lives in
the world below our feet.
I tell you that’s its home,
it is where it is supposed to be,
and without acknowledgment
you get off my back,
imitate my pose;
fixated by its slow movements.
I think of Coleridge
holding his child in
his frosted midnight
and try to capture this moment,
this wonder seen
through the eyes of a child,
not burdened by mortality
or the price of beer.
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