APPLES

1 2 9 R A P P L E S T A L V I K K I A N S E L I kept my toads in a cage circled beneath the apple tree. They said I was cold, I was not but I stole, see me there at dusk thinking no one cared about the apples they were abandoned, carrying them home, T-shirt heavy bulging with their weight and roundness, in the softening green, tree limbs glowing. We go back to patterns, the circles weeded beneath trees I repeat here, dirt crumbled and heaped up neatly like a dry mix before baking. Or, how laying out the garden plan, I shaped out rectangles, beds jutting out from the stone wall, anchored there perpendicular-wise. I merely watched was aware of the toads’ round-shouldered figures coming out from the sage at night their gold-flecked eyes. Remembering one that long ago followed me into the house, silent familiar in the corner on the wood-floored porch, or by the garbage pail. 1 3 0 A N S E L Y In a cage of twigs and chicken wire below the orchard’s trees. Go back to the monks’ tour of Manhattan Island’s orchards 1715, ‘‘Stone Fruits in Sweete Abundance.’’ The caged toads at the bases of trees unmolested by the dog who looks over them, inscrutable as to their bitterness. A sticky globe, apple red, tangles flies in the boughs, the toads are rewarded: the sweet taste of coddling moths the steady, plowing grubs that come to the trees. There’s always more to think of regarding apples: the graft enclosed in wax-bound string, a severed and healed branch. Roots seeking calcium, growing into the skeletons of Roger and Mary Williams. This apple tree, floating in the back field, but not really alone: the grubs, toads, green smudge of lichen on its limbs, the great crested flycatcher who shrieks above later in the summer season across the stone wall, another apple’s buds, the calcium in our bones bearing our sweet weight into evening. ...