Georgic: On Apples

How much of the world you know by heart
is unidentified, subsumed under
the Order Weeds or Birds or Insect/Bug?
How many trees are nothing beyond "the woods?"

How odd, then, suddenly to find apples
underfoot - gnarled, pocked, greenish fruits-
below a towering, half-dead tree you've passed
a thousand times in the seasons you've shared this land.

Tuned, now, to the cloying scent of cider,
you notice the same bark, the same branching
on half a dozen nearby trunks, each one
familiar and forsaken as the first.

What was this landscape like when all these trees
were saplings, when generations ago, someone
dreamed of an orchard - but why so far from a house,
near elms and maples that all but own the sun?

Later, it dawns on you that no one but deer
have planted the apple trees, just as birds
have sown the bramble of blackberries, black
raspberries, and dogwoods that ring your fields.

So now, after fifty or eighty years
of tortured, shaded, untended growth
it's apples of your very own you desire, hanging
so high in the canopy, that even the lowest

are beyond a ladder or any deer's leap.
You watch them swell and blush, blemish and skew,
you even entertain the notion of rigging
some scaffold, or inveigling the fire fighters...

but summer beats on, and the fruits, unripened, drop,
which was always their course before your paths:
no one eating the apples, no one noting
their fall. But now with you as witness and heir,

it's suddenly a crime to let the apples rot,
spoiling like the berries too far within
the brambles, entwined among the poison ivy.
How is it that merely because the tree's life

has reached into your own growing, you,
like Tantalus, are tormented by what's beyond
your grasp? Let the flesh, like the seeds, return
to earth. Absolve yourself this once, from the taking.