An Ode to This Apple

A poem about small perfections and some words of wisdom from Billy Collins

Last Sunday afternoon my husband and I had a Zoom call with Billy Collins. I mean, not just us and Billy Collins. More like us, Billy Collins and several hundred other listeners. But still, we both felt like we had gotten to meet one of our very favorite poets.

He read poems from his new collection, “Water, Water.” He was charming and funny, in that very dry way of his. And he was full of fantastic advice about writing poetry. I didn’t take notes, so I’m not quoting him directly, but here are a few of the things that really stood out to me:

• He talked about how he likes to speak directly to the reader, including as few other people in his poems as possible so that nobody comes between his words and the listener.

• “Start in Kansas; Go to Oz.” He talked about how starting a poem in some strange otherworldly place is interesting, but he prefers to start someplace familiar and take his reader along with him on the journey. “There’s a reason The Wizard of Oz starts in Kansas,” he said. If you start in Oz, your reader doesn’t know where they are or how you got there.

• “Don’t express yourself,” he said. And he said “express yourself” like it was something very messy that would need to be cleaned up. I think this was my favorite bit of wisdom. His point was that good poems aren’t about self-expression, they are about “building something, line by line, for your reader.”

I’m sure that reasonable people, and poets, could disagree about any of these bits of wisdom. But I loved hearing what he had to say, and he left me with so much to think about. The intimacy of his poems makes so much sense to me given his advice about keeping extra people out of his poems. The idea of starting in Kansas, not Oz feels like a rule I might break, but now I’ll break it with purpose. And I will always cherish that advice about constructing a poem not for me, but for my reader.

This has been something of a fallow period for me in terms of writing poetry. I’ve got plenty of notes on a myriad of topics, but none of them have been calling out to me lately. It’s fall and I’ve been busy with other things, like painting the deck, and putting the garden to bed. But listening to Billy Collins speak has renewed my interest in the process again. I’m looking forward to the quieter weeks of winter.

Today I’m sharing with you a poem I wrote last March after eating a particularly lovely apple on my lunch break at the library. It’s a reminder to me to recommit to the kind of noticing that poems are built upon. I’m headed to work today and looking forward to the busyness of books and people. And I’ve lots more to do in the garden before I hang up my snips for the season. But I feel ready to dive back in to a new season of poetry, as well, once the weather gives me permission to spend more time indoors.

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An Ode to This Apple

Who can tell with certainty
when choosing an apple that
it will be crisp, not mealy?
That it will be bright 
in flavor and not too sweet, 
but sweet enough? 
Who can tell? Not I. 
If there is a secret,
some arcane knowledge
prior generations possessed,
I did not know of it
when I chose you from 
the great mound in the grocery.
Who could have known
how like satin your skin 
would feel against my lips 
and the tip of my nose?
Who could have imagined
the perfect snap when my teeth
carved away that first bite?
Or the juice that would drip 
from my chin, from an apple
in March in a place where
apples this fresh are dreamt 
of only in September,
and rarely met even then.
We expect this sort of excess
from a peach and feel ourselves 
ill-used when we don't receive it.
But an apple that keeps me
enthralled to the very last
greedy, scraping bite?
Who could imagine such
a thing, and how shall I ever
learn to live without it again?

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Happy reading, everyone! Thanks for being here.