for Georgia and Ed Hadley
Stout and broad
as not any other apple tree I have ever seen,
growing at the edge of farmland and meadow,
it could be the beneficiary of
runoff from rolling crests of hillocks above it;
limbs upraised and held out
with its supple and fragrantly sweet
bounty of red and white buds. Just the sight
of it will imbed its glorious essence
within one’s very core, a dwelling
place for such rare images that feed the well
of living with a rare light of their own—
but that the apple tree now also resides
beside its humbler sister and a crabapple and
plum, which is naturally
evanescent, but whose preternatural
brilliance nurtures us with an image of what
is perpetual. Even when we attempt to
turn to walk away from the sheer dazzle
of such remarkable magnitude, we may even
stumble a bit in the wet grass in our attempt
to ever move away from it completely.
In its full dimension, complete, bounteous, as
is, it augments our lives with its
fragrant abandon, its lush magnificence,
the nearly incomprehensible amazement with
which it has instilled its beneficence
within us, not with the chaos or fury of
exaggeration or hyperbole, but with its nearly
shy humility, there by field’s edge—
dazzle
of the apple tree in blossom . . .
petals dropping in the rain
