Kelly DuMar masterfully captures “the holy moment that saves your life” in this deceptively simple prose poem.
—
Tree of the Apple
One thing you can do, your father suggests, after the funeral, when you’re faithless
and stupid with grief, is plant something to believe in, like a tree. Nothing can stand in
place of a boy becoming the man you would marry – but any life you set into soil, he
says, could stand one day for something tempting and fruitful as love. This life can be a
tree of your choosing – and an apple is fine.
So, together, you climb to the un-mowed meadow he owns at the top of this town’s
highest hill, overlooking the whole of your father’s farm and beyond to the blast-bright
sheet of Sebasticook shimmering under a joyless blue heaven. Holding between you this
burlapped ball of life there is so much silence, sharing the spade, disrupting the earth.
You tip the sapling into the hole, watch as the water you carried in the milk plastic jug
puddles into the well of dirt and vanishes.
After you leave your father’s farm for the home where you live with your mother, you
send news of new life on the hill with the view in a letter to his mother. You promise her
apples and she never answers.
Seasons later, when you visit the farm, you ask your father to show you the tree so you’ll
see what is grown, and he tells you it’s gone. He never believed, you see, in the promise
of fruit from a tree you weren’t able to tend. There was only this outcome: a cloudless
spring day under terrible blue, a burlapped ball of roots, the pooling of water poured from
a jug – the holy moment that saves your life.
***
First published in Kindred (2015)
Interested in submitting poetry to The Good Men Project? Check out our guidelines.
Like The Good Men Project on Facebook
Photo by Stepphuhn7 /Pixabay