even though I remember clearly the blossoms
on the crooked apple tree each spring, and how I
finally was tall enough my eighth year to reach the low
branch and swing myself up into the crook next to the trunk,
the rough bark chilly, rough, and damp against my backbone, white
petals edged with pink that worked their way into the spine
of my new book, Little House on the Prairie, how the leaves couldn’t
hide me from your gaze out the kitchen window, and that meant
I would be called down and into the house before the book
was finished.
All of this a lie, because you can’t remember the apple tree,
so it was never there, and I was never there, and
and I am just like my father, a liar who remembers things
that never happened, never were, in those spans of years
that were as unremarkable to you as the pressed apple blossoms
that tumbled from the pages of that yellowed, musty book
when I pulled it off the shelf.
Some people’s parents get Alzheimer in the old age and it comes as a shock and almost a personal affront by the grand life plan.
At least you were prepared for disillusionment throughout your life.
This poem is amazing. I love how the words progress throughout it’s body to come to a blunt, definitive point. I love a writer’s ability to use the aesthetic affect of words to portray a picture.
This might be far fetched, but did you structure the overall layout of the poem to look like a magnificent apple tree like the one described in the poem. I would even go as far to say that the words are also placed purpousfully to help describe different parts of the tree and the effects of reluctantly climbing out of it.