OLD APPLE TREES

 

 

 

For me more than any tour abolie,

these bits of broken orchard now surviving

            in unlikely places are my continuity,

 

a hope time past as yet may be time living.

Married tree couples now are drowning in woods.

            Or tipped this way and that, they peek and reach like odd misgivings

 

from the waste places, from ditches by roads,

in tatters, ancient refugees from orchards

fractured by improvements.  Speaking of much, they encode

 

another time: left to fight a rearguard

action, a sunken past by marker buoys

            made manifest, or as if the present had rough holes in its floorworks.

 

The past is another country, buried like Troy

beneath a layer of meaning, where we lingered

            oh so long as young and comely with our toys.

 

It was kind to us; we thrived here, singing:

            in a different sunlight, under another starlight, by other seas.