Apple.(Poem)

If I could come back from the dead, I would come back

for an apple, and just for the first bite, the first

break, and the cold sweet grain

against the roof of the mouth, as plain

and clear as water.

Some apple names are almost forgotten

and the apples themselves are gone. The smokehouse,

winesap and York imperial, the striped

summer rambo and the winter banana, the little

Rome with its squat rotunda and the pound apple

that pulled the boughs to the ground.

The sheep's nose with its three-pointed snout,

the blue Pearmain, speckled and sugared.

Grime's golden, cortland, and stamen.

If an apple's called "delicious," it's not.

Water has no substance

and soil has no shell,

sun is all process

and rain cannot rise.

The apple's core carries

a birth and a poison.

Stem and skin, and flesh,

and seed, the apple's name,

no matter, is work

and the work of death.

If you wait for the apple, you wait

for one ripe moment. And should

you sleep, or should you dream, or

should you stare too hard in the daylight

or come into the dark to see

what can't be seen, you will drop

from the edge, going over into

coarse, or rot, or damping off.

You will wake to yourself, regretful,

in a grove of papery leaves.

You need a hillside, a small and steady wind,

a killing frost, and, later, honey-bees.

You need a shovel, and shears, and a ladder

and the balance to come back down again.

You will have fears of codling moths

and railroad worms, and aphids.

Scale and maggots and beetles

will come to do their undoing.

Forests will trap the air

and valleys will bend to gales--

cedars will bring on rust, so keep them

far in the distance. Paradise,

of course, was easy, but you and I live

in this world, and "the fruit of the tree

in the midst of the garden"

says nothing specific about apples;

the "apples of gold" in Proverbs

are probably oranges instead.

And so are the fruits

Milanion threw down:

an apple does not glitter.

If you're interested in immortality

it's best to plant a tree, and even

then you can't be sure that form

will last under weather.

The tree can break apart in a storm

or be torqued into pieces over many

years from the weight of its ruddy labor.

The state won't let you burn the wood

in the open air; the smoke is too dense

for breathing. But apple-wood

makes a lovely fire, with excellent

heat and aroma.

Fire will take in whatever it can

and heat will draw back

into earth. "Here is the fruit,

your reward and penalty

at once," said the god

to the waiting figures.

Unbearable, the world

that broke into time.

Unbearable, the just-born

certainty of distance.

You can roast late apples

in the ashes. You can run

them in slices on a stick.

You can turn the stem to

find the letter of your love

or chase them down with

your chin in a tub.

If you count the seeds to tell

the future, your heart will

sense more than your

tongue can say. A body

has a season, though

it may not know it

and damage will bloom

in beauty's seed.

If I could come back from the dead, I would-

I'd come back for an apple,

and just for one bite, one break,

and the cold sweet grain on the tongue.

There is so little difference between

an apple and a kiss, between desire

and the taste of desire.

Anyone who tells you other

wise is a liar, as bad

as a snake in the quiet grass.

You can watch out for the snake and the lie.

But the grass, the green green wave

of it, there below the shadows of the black

and twisted boughs, will not be

what you thought it would be.

   

   Susan Stewart is the author of three books of poems, most recently The Forest (University of Chicago Press, 1995). She recently completed, with Wesley Smith, a new translation of Euripides' Andromache, forthcoming next year with Oxford University Press, and her prose study, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press, also in 2001.

Stewart, Susan