In a world as wrong as this one, all we…
The Apple
People drank the apples John “Appleseed” Chapman
planted during his Ohio migration
to Marietta by catamaran his scattered orchards slated
to be hatcheted in the name of Prohibition
before the Women’s Christian Temperance Union
repositioned the Hard Cider Nation, traded
knock-down drag outs for blossom-punched pie safes.
Cure-alls, they called them, rewriting the story
of the vegetarian eccentric who once punished his foot
for squashing a worm by throwing away his shoe,
wintered in a carved-out sycamore
outside Defiance likened his ways to a bumblebee’s,
lashed a side car of moss-cloaked seeds
to his hollowed hickory canoe—
Malus domestica
from Malus sieversii, wild sour fruit from the Old World
botanists have traced to Kazakhstan—
died wearing a coffee sack leaving a 1,200 acre estate,
snake root and joe pye weed trail sentries, first waft
of seasonal shift in the swamp gas, death
come to the luna moth he woke to find on his chest, silk-soft
dust of her scales under fingertips and himself
bathing in Little Soddy Creek losing his matte finish
of pollen drift a bobcat-stalked piss, nubby crow’s feet
carpet in which he washed apple-fleck-sized spears
from prickled hands looking
into a night sky stars not white but red,
green-white fleabane-colored, yellow
at the center with lavender edges if he kept his open eyes
fixed on nothing, his dust body wet.