A POEM ON A POME

                                          

                                              Lisa, you write:

                                                                        Slowly I gave up the sensual fruits;

                                                                        plums would no longer do.

                                                                        For me it was only apples, apples,

                                                                        clean, crisp, no guessing involved.

                        Firm, round, fresh fruit,

                        succulent & spurting with juice,

                        apples gleam & dribble with sensuality.

                        Take Bonnard’s apples, green-golden& red-lipsticky

                        or Gaughin’s peach-to-ruby complexions of natives prelapsed;

                        or the apple-cheeks of Matisse’s prostitutes, orange-spashed;

                        & Cezanne waxed lyrical, polished, glossed

                        as much as any supermarketed McIntosh.

                        Merry pippins colour more than high-blushed temptation:

                        the fall-out of Newton’s laws of gravitation

                        shine in the Garden of Hesperides as orbs of obsession;

                        the daily talisman of a healthy liver

                        becomes the apple of a lover’s eye, green-eyed lover;

                        & when Eris threw the golden apple in the assembly hall

of the gods, the discord appalled.

No, as sure as God made little (green) ones,

all fruits to the senses appeal if ripened.

Eve and New York fell for the apple in a big

way & what Ken Russell did for figs,

                      Sylvia Kristel probably did with bananas

          Dietrich would have done for grapes and cherries

          Rosie did for the consumption of cider

          oranges did for Nell Gwynne’s profile

          & Rude gave a serve to the whole platter

(Lisa, what exactly was your relationship to plums?)

                        She’s apples, the fruit of the earth, albeit Forbidden Tree,

                        the coddled balls at the core of our mythology,

whose mortal taste brought death into that world

and all our woe & all the burrowing moths encurled.

But the Tree of Knowledge forked our senses

to apply the apple of love to Golden Delicious;

so the fruit of our loins, Granny Smith is.

                                                                        Michael Small

Cambridge, Massachussets, USA

August, 1992

                        Some windfall;

                                         but hardly,

Still Life with Apples