The white-haired matron in the road-side hut
rattles two bags, “You pickin’? Bushel’r peck?”
Noa turns away, clings. I try: I love YOU,
a bushel and a … Her parents join the song
and she hazards a peek. The matron’s gaze, distant.
Noa motions her, Hug around the neck?—No?—
She takes me by hand dragging the bag into the paths
of weighted apple trees, fruit unreal, like decoration.
How many harvests allowed, this her first, the fields
guarded by a bracelet of bronze hills.
We choose and
pick and taste the Ida Reds, move on.
She cuts the row,
impatient to know, leads forward, the McCouns,
taking in the names, the Cortlands, the scents,
the illuminations of the Golden Delicious.
Sometimes I select,
or up the ladder of my back
she reaches
higher than I can see. All the trees
today are trees of knowledge, yad elohim,
G-d’s hand, everywhere, directing the snake
to keep away. All is temptation and thus beyond it.
The slanted afternoon burnishes. My eyes dim.
I know the deer have begun their descent on distant hills.
They’ll gather at dusk, graze at the chalice of the ground’s
cidered tithe a tinge of cold I feel a wintering
near A veil has dropped,
invisibly, only felt, like a single strand
of a basement cobweb across the brow.
Lagging half a step
behind the prints of my feet stamped in the damp
parting clumps of earth.
I look behind. Her parents
trail, her mother very pregnant.
They’ve waved. Where is the child?
“Shash!”
That’s her chastizing name for me. The voice
echoes among the trees. It’s not another apple she needs.
She wants to keep me lock-step with myself.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 25, Issue 4.
Owen Lewis is the author of three collections of poetry. His latest book, Field Light, was a Distinguished Favorite, 2020 NYCBigBook Award and a 2021 “Must Read”, Mass Book Awards. His chapbook best man was the recipient of the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize of the New England Poetry Club. Prizes include the International Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine, Honorable Mention for the Pablo Neruda Award, and most recently, the 2023 Guernsey International Poetry Prize. He teaches Narrative Medicine at Columbia University, Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons.
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