A Late Harvest of Apples

Darkly of entrails and ink an evening rain erupts 
and the day is buried in night.
Cold crescent and the true dark, 
and the untrue. Salt 
in the meat, in the cabbage. Salt in the bread. 
News from the city, pearlescent horrors, gumdrop vomit.
North is never north enough: another night now 
with my unlucky self, my flightless 
and undeceived, my knelt at the trough, my faint and retching. 
Earlier, under the brightest of the sun I saw a bird 
floating on the shallows of the lake, 
pulling up leaf after black leaf 
and swallowing. Now I cannot 
see the lake, I cannot see 
the horses, I cannot 
see anything 
but the electric light of a town fed 
on the feeders on blackness: the pickerel 
pulled and rising from the foliate towers, 
through those brief apertures of leaf and sun. 
How quickly they still 
and die with eyes that see nothing and, seeing nothing, 
are not eyes. My mother 
sits in her chair
like a jar of her younger selves. Bitter things 
last us through the winter.

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