1.
Mid-morning in Manhattan, she reaches
For the apple and pulls it from the bin.
Her hair is fine the color of corn silk,
Her own skin as smooth as unblemished fruit,
She means to turn to pay and go,
But, instead, comes in that huge instant
Aware that she holds the apple
As if she were herself an apple tree.
Roots shooting she feels from her feet
And senses stiffening in her trunk.
An unutterable motion of leaves
Brings her an intuition of breeze.
In this small grocery store, Kim’s,
Nothing now is as it was before.
The particular apple in her hand is
As sad and precious as an orphaned child,
Her own, lost, since she is now,
Herself other than she was.
Walls and floor, everything
That was the grocery store
Where she found the apple that she holds,
Dissolves into running dapple.
Motion prints on her breasts
In alphabets of shade and light
She dare not decipher
The patterns that forbid her rest.
She finds a rhythm that melts
Her into the wind, so only
The apple is substantial,
Moving as of its own accord.
She has passed beyond a bound
She never knew was there.
2.
The apple is a planet, herself
Its adoring atmosphere.
It spins and glides and twists
And turns and she is part
Of what she seeks, without hope
Ever of finding finished despair.
How can she say what it is
That happens to her when she
Is no longer herself or what
She thought she might become?
She makes the rain and caresses
The seas, lifting from them
A thousand thousand thousand
Momentary shapes of mist,
A calligraphy of vapors
Indifferent to its own elegance.
She is diffuse and flows
Within herself, swirling and whirling,
Describing in loops and eddies,
A dance which is not opinion.
As her weather develops, she surrounds
The apple with a climate, something
Of itself, yet not only such, something
Of her, yet not only hers, something
That has its own seeking and reaching
And groping beyond what it is now.
A climate becomes a way of life,
A way of life becomes a succession
Of beauties and tragedies, a blur of joys
And fear and blindness in ecstasy,
A series of stories absently remembered,
Marred and marred again in the telling.
The apple, the core of this atmosphere,
Goes on, rotating about its umbilicus,
Where a stem as dark as ink made a dimple
Which records original attachment.
A thought congeals somewhere in the clouds
She has arranged along fruit’s equator.
It is not her thought, nor thought
Of any thinking subject, just mist
Which has taken a mystifying twist
Towards the making of meanings.
“Can the apple go back to Eden,
Find the very place upon the very tree
From which long ago, whether because
Of serpent’s guile, Eve’s innocence,
Or Adam’s acquiescence, it was ripped
One lazy afternoon before hope?
Can stem be grafted back to branch,
Fruit find its place among the leaves,
Planet find absolution and abdicate
Its own horrendous history, herself
Establish some end to schemes of reparation,
Which have carried her beyond good and evil
To see coils of serpentine implication,
In acts of universally sanctioned love?”
3.
She wakes in terror in her own bed,
Her body naked beside a stranger’s body,
She feels, stranger to her self, she might be
Anywhere on a lush summer’s night, wondering
Why again she has taken too much to drink
And what her pleasure has wrought on her.
The stranger snores and she feels towards him
Unaccountable tenderness she would never allow
In regard of herself, for if she hates,
She hates only inwards, into an abyss
Of her own making, a place so deep, she
Imagines what she deposits there safe.
She sighs and tries to remember:
What was it she found and where?
What was the smoothness in her palm?
How did she dissolve into air?
What was that sense of herself as text,
Light and shade printing on her chest?
What is the current significance
Of her two breasts, here, beneath the sheet
Rising and falling with each breath,
Like hills on an elastic planet?
She wants to cry, not from despair
But from relentless trying to reconcile
What is here and what is there, what was
And what would never be, although it
Might have been, had only some other
Set of images from another dream
Achieved a sovereignty over the facts
Of air, inhaled, exhaled, lost beyond repair.
4.
She stretches and sleep prevails once more
So that, leaving the grocery store,
With the apple, now gold, nestled in her palm,
She takes, nude and beautiful, the other turn
And enters the Garden from the West
Beneath the red sword of a setting sun.
In the east, seven silver moons
Are rising in a scimitar shape
Above a horizon darkening velvet:
All is changed, all is rearranged.
The breezes whisper through the congregation
Of trees, as if they had all found tongues
Intelligible, in which to speak the truths
That have been so long exiled at the margins
Where thought and feeling go to ice and emptiness.
They speak rhythmically a dance of meanings
That she feels along the surface of her skin.
Now she knows what light and dapple
From that other wood that other day
Had tried to say in their stammering way.
She knows because she feels it in herself
And as herself, without pretense or argument.
Her feet find wings as, still holding
The heavy apple in her palm, she commingles
With the breezes, sinuous within their
Sinuosities, soothed in their smoothnesses.
She has an intuition of curves’ cunning that goes
Beyond anything she has known of caresses,
“Love’s a riddle,” she thinks, “that resolves
Itself within itself, vanishes into thin air…”
As she thinks this, her thought evaporates,
And she finds herself before the only frozen tree,
Bewitched gold, in a singing swaying grove,
As lithe and gently green as spring’s spirit.
She lifts herself, becoming a winged serpent,
From the ground and rises to the level
Of that single golden branch on which
The slightest wound only betrays a gap
From where, so long ago, a single apple
Was torn, casually, for just a taste.
She hisses, extends her tongue, dissolves
The golden matter of the branch, so that
It drips and, as it drips, she brings
The golden apple near, but this is all she knows
For, suddenly, no longer woman or serpent,
She finds herself fixed in place, neither apple
Nor branch of a tree, but the connection
That makes the two one again, a stem
That feels twilight breezes tug and sways and does
Not miss, this cycle done, the company of man.
5.
She wakes from this her second sleep
And finds the actual Adam is gone, an impression
In the bed the only sign that he was ever
There beside her, ever flesh and blood
Like herself, as she now seems to be,
Thinking, “I must go to the grocery store
And get necessities, bread and milk
And also some kind of fruit, perhaps an apple.”
Her head aches and though she knows
She can not be forever young, forever free
To choose temptation where she finds it,
She does not know how she knows, or why
She feels sure the sigh that escapes now
From her chest is not only her own but,
Like the breeze whispering into hot close
Morning before rain, part of what it opposes.