Apple
1.
Consider the apple–
not how it glows and blushes,
not the weight of it in your hand
nor the sound it makes
against your palm as you catch it
from your friend who has woven
his harvesting body up in the branches;
not the flood of sweetness
released from the snow
of its flesh, not the angle of your jaw
as you strain to violate the continuity
of its shape, not the alchemy
of its sheaves in your pastries,
not the parsimonious drop
of juice it might trail
just down to where
your lip meets
your chin.
2.
Consider that the apple,
as we know it,
plump and swollen with sugar,
originates from one valley in Kazakhstan.
One cupped fragment of land
contained a paradise of flavor
that infected continents.
3.
Imagine discovering
a wild orchard:
it is morning;
the dew
is on fire
with sunlight.
Suddenly you delight
in the heavy
and quiet decoration
of apples
and a kaleidoscope
of taste.
4.
The apple is a fruit
considered
“not true to seed.”
Eat the most delicious apple.
Take the seeds and germinate them;
let them grow into trees.
Likely as not,
they’ll be laden with fruit
fit only for pigs.
You can only replicate
the exact flavor of an apple
by grafting. Therefore,
all the trees
of a given variety
are clones.
5.
In colonial times
almost every family had an orchard.
Innovators prided themselves
in their painstaking
selection of edibility.
Vast experimental orchards
expressing themselves
as a lottery of characteristics.
And in the glut
of the harvest
there weren’t even enough
neighbors to foist them upon;
the world was intoxicated
on the scent
of rotting apples.
6.
Consider the mythologization
of the hidden valley.
Not the real valley becoming a story,
but rather the possibility of hidden secrets
going the way of so many
challenges of the past
that meted out delight
like wasp stings-
rare, piquant, and
spaced far apart unless
you were daring and a little foolish
and went poking where you ought not.
7.
Imagine your apple collection
as multifunctional as its enemy,
the pocketknife.
An apple that keeps through the spring,
another that bakes well,
another for sauces.
An apple that is sweet for the babies
and an apple for cider,
the apple that tastes like a pear.
The apple you offer to guests when they arrive early
and the apple you carve into a stamp.
The apple that will rot inside its
hardening skin until you make
a little slit and drink its paste,
the apple you lob at the fools on stage.
The apple small enough to sink
your teeth into when it floats in water.
8.
Consider the apple,
dense little seed planet,
flushed pome,
brilliant pocket
of solidified sunlight
and time.
Bio: Rachel Shopper is the associate poetry editor at Orison Books, a non-profit literary press focused on the life of the spirit. Her work has appeared in The Asheville Poetry Review and Armchair/Shotgun. She holds a B.A. in English Literature from Wesleyan University, and currently studies at the Wilderness Awareness School.