Today's poem is by Timothy Donnelly

Digging for Apples
       

Give me my shovel
    of love for the sound
it makes slipping into
    the gravelly ground
        where we buried all the golden ones;

give me my boots
    with weights in the heels
to root me where I am
    not wanking off in fields
        of rareripes and dandelions;

give me a backdrop
    of what can't be controlled
to lend me by contrast
    an air of great deliberateness, and I'll get
        back to business, but first—

what if the poem itself
    is what's narcissistic, irrespective
of authorship, and this is
    what makes it appeal to us,
        not because it can love us but

because it needs us to watch
    it love being itself, and the surplus
we're left with in
    the end is what we call
        beautiful, like starlight on snowfall?

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Copyright © 2024 Timothy Donnelly All rights reserved
from Colorado Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission