The Apple Shrine

MAY 1993

LINDA PASTAN

THE APPLE SHRINE

Last week you gathered armfuls of apple blossoms

from trees along the roadway, and a few

from the bent Cortland down the street,

to place beneath our nameless apple tree

for pollination, you said, so we'd have fruit

next winter. Looking out the window at those rags

and shreds of blossoms beneath the tree,

it could have been a makeshift shrine I saw

in one of those unlikely places where miracles

are said to happen, sightings of angels

or the Virgin, where later ordinary people

place gifts of dolls and colored handkerchiefs.

How fitting, I thought, as if we worshiped

the garden itself, or spring. Just one day later

and equally strange, but fearful,

you seemed to lose your vision, went half blind

after work in the garden, for a transgression

not even you with your Science understand.

Healing too is mysterious, the way the seasons

heal each other, one month at a time;

or what can happen in a week in a darkened room

where we both sat thinking about how quickly

everything can change, how thin the crust

of ice we walk on-such thoughts themselves perhaps

a kind of prayer. Today you start to see again,

and I wonder how long we'll remember to be grateful

before we lose ourselves complicitously

in the everyday, waking up surprised one morning

next autumn when for the first time

our tree will be strung with a rosary of apples.