NORMAN FISCHER

VARIATIONS ON ROBERT FROST’S “AFTER APPLE PICKING”

What’s desired,
A load of apples
To be cherished
Not to let fall

Pales
In the pall
Of next moment’s
Release

How hard my head is
How long the day
Not to be compared
To any other way

Of being anyone else –
In my
Solitude
I turn over in my hand

These shining fisted apples
I’d wished to grow
Not knowing
They’d fall

This far from the tree
Onto a triangular mossy stone
In Shunryu’s damp garden
To rot

In their sweetness
To gradually be
Food
For frogs
Do frogs
Or woodchucks
Dream human dreams?
Do they
Cut off

The narrative flow?
Rumble of load on load
Of apples coming in

The cellar bin
At the foot of experience
Wholly able to foretell
What tender mercies there do dwell

In apples upon some tree
Or on some bough
That fall through air
There, still upon the ground

*

Desultory days
So full of subject matter and principled
Reverberations

How high the sky and what
Melody implants itself upon the brain
Or tongue to loose the louder rafters

Of the house –
All hail this human stain
The tragic never-improved smear

Of living grease upon the stair
So that I shall remember
And revere the memory –

Tears fall upon my sleeve ruining my make-up
When I see the Emperor
In his full regalia

In the prime of life –
There is more to be organized
Upon a life than that
One hopes? They fell
But I was well upon my way to sleep
Bruised in the cider-apple heap
Like bad bedclothes –
How detect a frame
For all that living now

If only history’s pattern
Repeats upon the wall

*

This pit, a pratfall,
One good laugh or
Danger, to make me feel alive

Is it ever all, and could it ever
Be – a mere matter
Of company

However human
That is –
Lingers there

The pressure of the ladder round
Pains
Balls of the feet

And the blossoms’ peroration
Sickens finally when there’s too much
Of apple picking now –

That’s a winter’s sleep
Perhaps a dream
In which a ladder appears –

This being born and dying
While drinking water
Is not so easy as it looks

*

The long ladder
Or the road, perhaps
The sea that bends

Under its own weight is not
So real as heaven above,
Air beyond the top of my head –

Apples
Hold me to earth
More lumpy still

With each step up I take
Till I practically disappear
Looking through the tines of a fork

The pesky woodchuck could not tell
He is barren of birches
Like a mongoose or a prancing

River otter he’s furtive
In his need so slinks
In corners or margins

Holding me back
With his sharper apron strings
Till I can’t not sit still

*

Every fleck of russet
Shows through all my
Best bruises –

A bruise
Is blood
Is blue or bad

Isn’t the sort of statement
Anyone could love
Let it drop with a thud

All my heart my breath
All the word tied to a bundle:
Or just some human sleep

*

A barrel besides I didn’t quite fill
Two or three apples
In my fist

Looking back I did not see
What I wanted so to be
Except as turbulent water

In which my face distorted
So I thought I was
Another

Looking as if through a frozen frame –
How direct apples are
How weighty their contrition

Guilt upon my hand,
No mere blood,
Carried like a rack through time –

Magnified apples
Appear and disappear
Every fleck of russet showing through

*

What ails me I could not know
Nor were he here
Could the woodchuck

Afford to vanish to the rear
Under my painful foot
That holds the pressure of a ladder round

All one needs or wants
Forever here:
Apples whirling in air

*

The sea’s turbulence
Rendered in its own swirling medium
Not anything to be touched or held,

Even seen,
These apples pressed
To their sweetness

***