“I want to sleep the sleep of apples”
After Lorca
“I want to sleep the sleep of apples”
After Lorca
color turning
over sleep
mutter seed
branch’s
divine reach
after god
matador of
making
pliant chasing
green surely
moss and leaf
live this speed
tracing the name decay
with resin-coated lips
night here
ravenous and oblique
root-licking
finger-licking
undulating stream awake
and ancient as a baby
this putrid sweet —
the blossomed nose
of weeks
and the bees
clouds I do not know
release your pent-up river
over hill and orchard
Hello! It’s been a while. It’s been a busy couple of weeks full of family, travel and new things.
I was visiting my folks who have a new place just outside of Durango, CO. On the property, they have a small (but oh so mighty) orchard that was filled to bursting with apples and stone fruit. It was delicious! In the high desert, the sun and water play tricks on trees; you can tell by looking at them. Each branch is more gnarled than the last, growing in a pattern of unfurling and discovery. This poem is largely about that, coupled with some other broad strokes from my trip.
I read this poem by Gabriel Garcia Lorca while I was traveling and the line“I want to sleep the sleep of apples” just felt really resonant with the hours spent watching the fruit from the porch.
D and I recently watched a movie called River which has some spectacular footage of river systems and tells the story (abstractly) of the importance of rivers. There is a montage at the end that suggests clouds are just rivers in a different form and shows some time lapses of clouds moving as rivers do. Pretty cool.
Since it’s been a while, a super rough, short, bonus poem below - wrote it quickly while we were driving back from a spectacular hike that we did outside of Silverton, CO.
Western Lights
Not yet to sky
still streaking the high-
est lake this side
of the rockies
the blush of a face we
cannot see
Hope you all are well and maybe even bumped into a poem recently.
Thanks for reading.