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“Gather”
Some springs, apples bloom too soon.
The trees have grown here for a hundred years, and are still quick to trust that the frost has finished. Some springs, pink petals turn black. Those summers, the orchards are empty and quiet. No reason for the bees to come.
Other summers, red apples beat hearty in the trees, golden apples glow in sheer skin. Their weight breaks branches, the ground rolls with apples, and you fall in fruit.
You could say, I have been foolish. You could say, I have been fooled. You could say, Some years, there are apples.
Perhaps like me you've had the experience of listening to a poet read and finding yourself in tears without knowing exactly why you're crying. Or of reading a poem on the page and being deeply moved and only afterward working out for yourself what it is that moves you. For me, Rose McLarney's “Gather” is such a poem.
McLarney is a poet whose name I hadn't known until I stumbled on her work in a poetry blog I subscribe to. She writes out of her rural North Carolina dailiness—out of experience on the surface of it that is a long way from my own urban life.
But while her metaphors may be local they are also universal—as here in “Gather.” I may be a city boy but I have gone apple picking. I know what an astonishing place an orchard can be at harvest time; I know what it is “to fall in fruit.” This would seem to me to be the first condition of poetry—the evocation of rich and recognizable experiencing.
By rich experiencing I mean not just the lovely image of apples weighing down and breaking the branches, the fallen ones covering the ground, but the larger concatenation of meanings—the abundance and overabundance, the excitement of plenty beyond plenty, the taste and smell of ripe apples, the sense that there are more here than one could ever eat, the sense, too, that this is a recurring miracle, a gift to be “gathered.” And, of course, the still larger sense that this is a lucky gift and by no means inevitable—as with rosebuds, to be