The Apples
The city budget squads have trimmed its hours.
“You can’t get in, just go home why don’t you.”
I couldn’t tell how old she was.
Chalky braids crisscrossed her head;
the trenchcoat bunched around her waist
like paper flowers, her bare legs
streaked pink.
She held a net bag, very French,
filled with cans.
It's equinox.
Sycamore leaves bank at curbs
and blip in bike-wheel spokes.
My old library’s closed. It’s always closed
when I make visits home.
Starlings rake song across the wires.
I used to ride my meaty Schwinn
to this better neighborhood.
“You can’t. You can’t.” She quivered
and chopped the bag against her knee.
Saying that,
I make a mimicry of her.
I learned to do it
in the big, lemony room of floodlit books.
Gg Zz Bb leafed from the walls.
Sky-blue globe. Soiled card catalog.
Robinson Crusoe walked across the room,
studying matter, its provisioning use
and weedy homemade powers: I put my feet
into his splayed prints in the sand,
but when he looked behind, he said
Find your own place, kid. Grow up.
You can’t you can’t. I lost her
in the splintered Sears and Pep Boys doors
down the block, the lost-lease sales
and recycling bins.
I feel her words, or think I do,
like matter, plasmic and boreal.
A bus diesels from the curb;
leaves chase its wheels.
Noon light
drenching the tall windows
prints images behind the steel mesh:
clouds crossing sky, stone housefronts,
football rising end over end,
sneakers on power lines like skins
of souls fled or stolen.
Equinox. Measure, middle,
I know I know. All I feel is motion
sucking me in its draft.
The middle’s a fiction. I dreamed again
I materialize in the big room,
high ceilings, maybe a sky, the walls
all books sickly organized, but among them
the one true book I’ll find by accident.
It will occur to my hands, like Crusoe,
near a textbook’s see-through images
of the body’s solid veins, muscle mass,
bloodworks and nerve draperies.
It’s the book I knew I’d find.
I don’t want half measures. The season
slides to winter. That thought’s complete.
Her voice, too, stands watch,
sits, I mean, with me on the cold steps,
while I kill time
reading the book I brought along.
Ruskin, who loved fireflies and unities,
says that the dragon
who guards the golden apples
never sleeps, he hoards them
in his finny coils,
and his greatest skill is mimicry,
mocking human voices,
calling to us in tones
we recognize, until we believe
he’s something or someone else.
Then it’s too late.
Copyright Credit: W. S. Di Piero, “The Apples” from Skirts and Slacks. Copyright © 2001 by W. S. Di Piero. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Source: Skirts and Slacks: Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2001)