Apples
Apples. Bark apples,
block apples, tea apples,
cart apples, apples also
apples: singing harp apples,
Helen’s apples, little green
apples. Not apples: treacle
guns, horses, pears, peas,
cannibals. I’ll trade my
puppy for one good black
pip. Redblueyellow
apples in neon signs,
dead black apples
in the fire,
apples big as
lion hearts, bounding
sounding blue apples,
like bells in temples.
Only apples
have no keepsakes.
The core is
dour, sour.
Eternal Return
Apokatastatic,
the haystack glistens
in the sunlight,
a yellow disheveled hill
untold wisps, stalks, bits,
sticking out of it
like fool’s gold.
The day ends,
bends the colors away;
the sun sets.
In the dark,
the hay loses shape, outline,
but there it is still,
shining through the millenia,
one way or another
reminder of the harvest,
of man’s life and work
on earth,
day and night
shining its light,
running its course,
from one post to the next.
Jack D. Harvey’s poetry has appeared in Scrivener, Mind In Motion, The Comstock Review, The Antioch Review, Bay Area Poets’ Coalition, The University of Texas Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal and a number of other on-line and in print poetry magazines over the years, many of which are probably kaput by now, given the high mortality rate of poetry magazines.
The author has been writing poetry since he was sixteen and lives in a small town near Albany, N.Y. He was born and worked in upstate New York. He is retired from doing whatever he was doing before he retired. He once owned a cat that could whistle Sweet Adeline, use a knife and fork and killed a postman.