The weight of apples

For Karen

In blood-beaded elderberry, starlings clatter
like teaspoons in a drawer, while underfoot,
loosed suddenly by heat, apples are strewn.
Their fall has been as surreptitious
as the fall of years, the death of birds.

These early Gravensteins could be
the first apples there ever were,
a smear of red on hollow green, as youth is,
misshapen and with lesions where they fell.
Lanky with neglect, and bramble-draped,

the tree gropes everywhere for light
but still, it‚s knotted tight with fruit.
I follow wraiths of cloud that push
eastward, as usual, to the coast,
to where the longest Januaries passed.

Some days, tired of the beach, we‚d go
round to the pickers, out on ladders thinning
Red Delicious, MacIntosh or Jonathans
in the big orchard by the coolstore.
While back at the house the Gravensteins,

that wouldn‚t sell, were ours alone.
Remember Danny? His Italian eyes,
as fierce as summer, narrowed against us,
the sullen muscle of his arms pulling at shade
that slides and shivers over them?

Those practised hands, reading the tree like braille,
could pinch an unripe pear into his palm,
turn treacherous and pelt in a tantrum of bravado
or lust for the boss‚s girl. The one that
hit you in the growing breast, that doubled you up.

And us escaping bareback on the shambling pacer -
good enough, your thin-lipped father said,
for a daughter - the handspan of waist
flaring in my grip, the synchronised
last-minute duck under low branches

on the home corner the horse cut every time.
Once at the Gravenstein he snatches rein,
wrapping bristled lips around each globe
and slobbering the pulp, while we too
bite and suck, shushing our inklings of desire,

loll along the horse, fritter and trill like wrens.
You, last seen, were catching my bouquet.
Now we‚re in our second flowering.
What we said then - the words we used -
are long gone, and not regretted,

but apples are much heavier than words.
Each year each windfall holds whole summers
in its scheme of things: sea and sky
that borrow and return their blue,
the smell of girl-and-horseskin in the sun.

© Louise Oxley