Even generous August,
only a child’s scribblings
on thick black paper, in smudgeable chalk—
even the ripening tomatoes, even the roses,
blowsy, loosing their fragrance of black tea.
A winter light held this morning’s apples
as they fell, sweet, streaked by one touch
of the careless brush, appling to earth.
The seeds so deep inside they carry that cold.
Is this why some choose solitude, to rise
that small bit further, unencumbered by love of earth,
as the branches, lighter, kite now a little higher
on gold air? But the apples love earth and falling,
lose themselves in it as much as they can at first touch
and then, with time and rain, at last completely:
to be that bone-like One that shines unleafed in winter rain,
all black and glazed with not the pendant gold of
necklaced summer but the ice-color mirroring starlight
when the earth is empty and dark and knows nothing of apples.
Seed—black of the paper, seed-black of the waiting heart—
December’s shine, austere and fragile, carves the visible tree.
But today, cut deep in last plums, in yellow pears,
in second flush of roses, in the warmth of an hour, now late,
as drunk on heat as the girl who long ago vanished into green trees,
fold that loneliness, one moment, two, love, back into your arms.