The Apple

People drank the apples  John “Appleseed” Chapman   planted   during his Ohio migration

to Marietta by catamaran  his scattered orchards slated to be hatcheted in the name of   Prohibition

  before the Women’s  Christian Temperance Union repositioned the Hard Cider  Nation, traded

knock-down drag outs for  blossom-punched pie safes.   Cure-alls,   they called them, rewriting the story

of the vegetarian eccentric  who once punished his footfor squashing a worm  by throwing away his shoe,

wintered   in a carved-out sycamore outside Defiance    likened his ways to a bumblebee’s,

   lashed a side car    of moss-cloaked seeds to his hollowed hickory   canoe—

Malus domestica from Malus sieversii,    wild sour fruit from the Old World

botanists have traced    to Kazakhstan— died wearing a coffee sack  leaving a 1,200 acre estate,

snake root and joe pye weed  trail sentries, first waft of seasonal shift in the swamp gas,    death

come to the luna moth he woke to find   on his chest, silk-soft dust of her scales under fingertips   and himself

bathing in Little Soddy Creek   losing his matte finish of pollen drift   a bobcat-stalked piss, nubby crow’s feet

carpet in which he washed   apple-fleck-sized spears from prickled hands   looking

  into a night sky   stars not white but red, green-white   fleabane-colored, yellow

at the center with lavender edges   if he kept his open eyes   fixed   on nothing, his dust body wet.