Apples at Graestone

My favorite Robert Frost poem is “After Apple Picking”. It is a wonderful poem in which Frost, just as he drifts off to sleep, has all the images of picking apples running through his mind. I know there are all sorts of analyses in which loftier folks than I think it is about a man who is old and dying, thinking of his life. I sort of doubt it, as Frost wrote this when he was fairly young. I like to think of it as the feeling we get when we have done something all day and then try to get to sleep; sort of like feeling the bed move after we have spent the day in a boat. For those of you who like the more cerebral meaning, now you know why I taught 6th grade.

After Apple Picking

Robert Frost

My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.

And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.

I am a fall person. I think it has something to do with being from Los Angeles and fall meant Santana (Santa Anna as most folks call them) winds. Santa Annas means blue skies. The trees begin to turn and LA becomes as beautiful as it was before we all got cars and started driving a million miles a day. When Ruth and I first moved to New Mexico we drove up Fairview Lane to get to the school and for a while, every morning, we remarked about the blue sky. After about a week it dawned on us, the sky was blue every day.

Over the years I have about 20 poems I have written and most were written in the fall. I am starting to get the fall feeling that comes with poetry time. Perhaps it is because here the summer is a bit shorter. Maybe it is because of the blue skies. Maybe I have not realized that skies are blue here every day. The trouble is most of my poems are reflective, like Frost’s After Apple Picking. I rarely write about an event that happened today. I write about events I have had a chance to digest and meditate upon.

I am thinking that I can see great potential for a poem or two but it is all too new. I suppose we don’t really know what things mean until we have had a chance to reflect a bit.