Apple Thieves

 In his dishevelled garden my neighbour

Has fourteen varieties of apples,

Fourteen trees his wife put in as seedlings

Because, being sick, she wanted something

Different to do (different from being sick).

In winter she ordered catalogues, pored

Over subtleties of mouth-feel and touch:

Tart and sweet and crisp; waxy, smooth

And rough. Spring planted an orchard,

Spring projected summers

Of green and yellow-streaked, orange, red,

Rusty, round, worm-holed, lopsided;

Nothing supermarket flawless, nothing imperishable.

Gardens grow backwards and forwards

In the mind; in the driest season, flowers.

Of the original fourteen, five trees

Grow street-side, outside the hedge.

To their branches my neighbour, a retired

Statistician, has clothes-pegged

Slips of paper, white pocket handkerchiefs

Embroidered with the words:

The apples are not ripe, please don’t pick them.

Kids had an apple fight last week.

In September, when the apples ripen,

Neighbours are welcome to pick them, even

Those rare Arkansas Blacks that spill over

The hedge. Yes, I may gather the windfalls.

Mostly it’s squirrels that throw them down.

Squirrels are wasteful. Squirrels don’t read

Messages a widower posts in trees.

(The New Yorker, 22 April 2019)

 A SHELL

The earth mother forms

Of this chalky shell

Belong to a sea snail

Exoskeleton

I pulled from debris

Upchucked by a tide

On my shoreline of memory:

Rain-haunted,

Littered with logs storms

Rip from booms

Southering to sawmills

And lumberyards.

I touch the too-solid

Flesh,

Finger the elegant

Mathematical spirals,

Slip into

The voluptuous interior

Of this empty house

A nudge will set rocking

Almost indefinitely.

(Times Literary Supplement, 29 May 2019)

WHITE SHEETS

Airstrike hits wedding party—breaking news

The empty laundry basket
fills with molecules of light. 
She stands beside it, arms falling
into the aftermath of the task.
Gesture is a proto-language
researchers say: the same circuits
light the brain when a chimp
signals help me please (hand
outstretched, palm up) as when
human beings process speech. 
In the cave the hunter figure
mirrors his spear’s trajectory
towards the deer it will never,
of course, attain. The woman
sees nothing untoward. Her body
bars the spattered something
in the middle distance, though all
of this is right up close: the shed
they’ll use to dress the meat, the plane
geometry of white sheets
on a line.  The world is beautiful,
she thinks, or feels, as deer
sense something coming
and move out of range.  Beautiful,
the woman thinks, and lifts
the laundry basket to her arms—
beautiful, and orderly.

                       (The Forward Book of Poetry 2013 and White Sheets, CB editions, 2012)