Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, APPLES FALLING, by LOUISE TOWNSEND NICHOLL


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

APPLES FALLING, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: All night long, in the close september darkness
Last Line: Falling to the ground.
Subject(s): Apples; Fruit


All night long, in the close September darkness,
The apples fall,
Loosening high,
Dropping with swiftly-muffled thud
Upon the ground.
And there is a line of straightness between that high,
Still, mysterious loosening and the ground,
And at the end of the line the apple,
Let down upon the earth,
Round upon round --
So that all night straight pillars are dropped,
Straight pillars with rounded bases,
Which will not show by day.

So quiet is the loosening
One cannot tell at all
By the hushed dullness of the thud
How long has been the fall.
Some hung high and some hung low,
Each with a different length to go --
But thud and fall and muffled thud
And every sound the same,
And never a way for an ear to tell
How far an apple came.
There is no thought now of red on green,
Here in the darkness.
There is no pungency of odor coming in
At the cool, wide square of black.
And the biting into them is unthinkable now --
The crisp sound of teeth in the watery white fibre of the apple --
The juice, the seeds shaped maddeningly black and perfect --
Their crunching sound when chewed.
There are no vivid things like sight and taste and smell
Here in the thudded dark --
Only the dimmer, deeper, mystic ones
Of sound and an imagined touch.
Now for a little while that thought of touch must linger --
Of how it feels to the earth to get and hold
Its rounded, dropping treasure.
There is quick, irrelevant need for an apple curved into
The hollow of a palm;
And then the soothing sense
Of the nest-like place the apple makes
In the matted, old September grass.
Then touch, too, goes, and there is only
Sound,
The hush of unseen red onto its unseen green.
The darkness, close and near, is punctuate
With apples dropping to the ground.
They fall, but I do not see them,
Red on the brown-green ground;
And if my ear were stopped with sleep,
There would be no sound.

And yet, here in the darkness,
Unseen, unheard, this would go on.
In a hundred long gardens of the earth tonight,
Where no ear is,
The apples fall.
No sight, no taste, no smell --
No rounded touch, no sound --
But apples falling, falling,
Falling to the ground.





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