Cutting Back

His first orchard half
wild, haw apples toppling over
snake fence, split heart wood,
small fruit knuckled
as an amputation.

In a row of cameo
and northern spy he eases
the long-handled lopper
into crowns too thick
for light. Takes the base
of a scaffold branch, feels the beak
catch, resist, then
sheer. The branch staggers loose,
swings from clasped twigs, tumbles.
He stoops to gather the silver branches
to force by the stove in the kitchen.
He will say apple
of my eye and she reply
unlucky.

All day, he does this
slow work. He has seen fire
do it quicker -- shells popping limbs
with blind precision.
Through the twilight, now
black dog comes bounding
like a mortar.

_________

Yesterday I finished Ghost Maps (again) and today I wrote a new poem for it (again). Bah.

This one is for part five, the after-the-war section. That section makes me nuts. It's too lose, and it doesn't really have an arc, except perhaps to address what the first poem asks: "How much of the memory / is carried in the body."

Editing a book is more work than I thought it would be. I thought once you had the poems written, that was pretty much it. Wrong. So very, very wrong.