Enter Reaching

Red. Yellow. Green. Hint of blush and falling leaf,
Necessary as bread, sweetness of life lived
Out of time and in the stolen, hidden moments
We forget even as we breathe them in. Red.
Yellow. Green. You see them from a distance
In the orchards between farmhouses, bruised
In the stiffening grass, marked by months
On limbs, marked by limbs branched over secrets
The seasons tell. Hard to hold, skin a sheen
Of untouching, one’s own skin aged in comparison.
We climb up, far into the night, tethered to dark clouds
In search of the finest jewel, the one whose surface
Knows nothing but the ripeness locked inside,
The sweetness and more, the potential and more,
Longing, expanding, infinite in the cycle of same,
Each new and each never new, each new and all
Not new to the old story of the sisters weaving
And mumbling, whispering and seeing beyond
The rise of the bud and the fruit and the fallen time.
Yellow teeth biting into white pulp. Gnarled hands
Unable to cup the roundness. Frost taking some
To its wintry home, brown and stained, a world
Beyond known hues of red, yellow, green.
*There are several indicators of apple maturity.
Mature apples are firm, crisp, juicy, well- colored,
and have developed the characteristic flavor
of the variety. Red color alone is not a reliable
indicator of maturity. Red. Yellow. Green.
Gold are the apples twining through the myth.
Golden is the color of your love’s true name,
The morning promise and the retreat of shadow
Land. Gold is the weaving of one life into another,
The rarity of real feeling, the fulfilled press
Of body into body, all the hours a gradual forgiveness
Of the hours on the other side. Oh if we could only be
As golden as we are meant to be. If only
The reaching toward desire were enough
To remove us from the land of facts and function,
Of definition, of noted indicators, of the object
That can never be new in its meaning to us.
And yet, this is our time. We enter reaching.