Painting by Pamela Heater
Windfall Apples
I'm sitting in my green chair reading a novel
and then I'm standing
in the apple orchard of the old place, training
my bay gelding to ground-tie. Then
I'm talking with my mother
and her oldest sister, Rayma. Aged 90,
widowed 40 years, she tells us that last night
her husband knocked on the door
of her double-wide trailer.
"Did you let him in?" my mother asks,
and Rayma says, "No I did not."
But there he stands, as she describes him—
young as her grandson, grinning that shit-eating grin
of his from the other side of the screen.
"And the moon," she says, "stood right over his shoulder
like he'd carried it all that way to me."
In the orchard my bay gelding
seems already to know how to ground-tie, a trick
he must have learned as a colt. When I walk back
to him, he lowers his head and nudges
the grass for apples. I'm sitting in my green chair,
but in memory it's September, a windfall apple
dripping juice down my chin.
