Annmarie Lockhart

Kleber’s Apples

The car smells like Kleber’s sun-warmed apples

and Tom Petty is telling me the waiting is the hardest part.

I have just spent two hours I will never get back inside

a windowless white room inside a local library

listening to poets who do not farm praise the

restorative nature of soil, ponder what it is to be

a pollen spore of distinctive heritage, ruminate on whether

ghosts made love on dragonfly wings in a far-flung forest.

These writers know the names of every variety of bird.

They speak of nuthatches and tits, un-ironically.

One tells of Virginia Woolf collecting stones

to line her pockets, pie weights on unbaked dough.

I feel the weight of two hours spent in contemplation

of a famous suicide, wonder why no one risked ripping

the scab off a personal attempt at death or life or love.

Kleber’s apples taste like sunshine, with a bruise or two

where they’ve bumped against the earth and each other.

Living poetry sounds like friends eating apples in a kitchen

that has stood for centuries, talking about past lives and

next lives, charting paths across New Jersey, dancing

and writing and waiting among neighbors and children

and lovers and others while cows collect in the yard

and apples fall from the trees under the reborn August sun.