I'm going to read one more from my book,
because I actually forgot to bring the other poem that
was in the Journal.
And then I'll end on the Spanish poem, so.
I have a lot of fruit poems, I'm realizing, so.
And you know I'm also thinking, like, I
have a pillow when I travel.
I carry my own pillow with me.
So now hearing that [? just messed me all up ?]
[LAUGHTER]
I have to catch a red-eye tonight to Milwaukee.
But I think I'm going to leave the pillow in the car.
[LAUGHTER]
I don't need it.
"I watch her eat the apple.
She twirls it in her left hand, a small, red merry-go-round.
According to the white oval sticker,
she holds apple number 4016.
I've read in some book or other of 4,015 fruits she held
before this one, each equally dizzied
by the heat and the tips of her fingers.
She twists the stem, pulls it like the pin of a grenade.
And I just know somewhere, someone is sitting alone
on a porch, bruised, opened up to their wet white ribs,
riddled by her teeth, lucky.
With her right hand, she lifts the sticker from the skin.
Now the apple is more naked than any apple
has been since two bodies first touched the leaves of ache
in the garden.
Maybe her Apple is Macintosh, maybe Red Delicious.
I only know it is the color of something I dreamed,
something I gave to her after being away for 10,000 nights.
The apple pulses like a red bird in her hand.
She is setting the red bird free,
but the red bird will not go.
So she pulls it to her face, as if to tell it a secret.
She bites, cleaving away a red wing.
The red bird sings.
Yes, she bites the apple, and there is music--
A branch breaking, a ship undone by the shore, a knife making
love to a wound, the sweet scrape of a match lighting
the lamp of her mouth.
This blue world has never needed a woman
to eat an apple so badly, to destroy an apple,
to make the apple bone.
And she does it.
I watch her eat the apple, carve it to the core,
and set it wobbling on the table, a broken bell I
beg to wrap my red skin around, until there is no apple.
There is only this woman who is a city of apples.
There is only me, licking the juice
from the streets of her palm.
If there is a god of fruit, or things devoured,
and this is all it takes to be beautiful,
then god please let her eat another apple tomorrow."
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]