Today's poem is by Melissa Kwasny

The Apple Tree in Blossom
       

functions like a windbreak a deer disappears into
or a conversation wherein the point is lost.
A dressing room for the angels to try on
their various costumes: a swarm of mosquitos,
a net of light that snags the bunting's flimsy song.
I am rapidly disappearing into the numerous,
into shyness. Oh, the scholar I tried to be!
Retirement means to be forced out of public life.
I am eating white petals from a voluptuous,
rose-like sea, as if it had any ceremonial purpose.
A dog barks all day on a very short chain.
Lengthen the chain and the world has hope again.
My friend has Alzheimer's. Here, give this
almond to the dog, I say, and she nods and chews it.
My friend is a changing situation. She wanders
her old routes through the gardens, staring at what
she will no longer be able to find. That part
of your life is over, we could each say, at any point,
which is terrible and sad, intimacy being
a better goal than non-attachment. The apple tree
is old, almost sixty-five years, its trunk bent
under its loft. Loft, a tender word, as in the past
tense of lift. Loft, as the measure of the fluffiness
of down. Aloft. Afloat. Aflutter. A calm.
Someone planted it knowing it would outlast them.

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Copyright © 2024 Melissa Kwasny All rights reserved
from Copper Nickel
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission