For the Record

I did not consume the apple.
The apple consumed
me.

I explained this to you. You, with your green scarf and year-round tan skin. Your hair is short so that the dark curl cannot be detected. I explained that the apple tasted fine but normally I probably would not have liked it. It was too soft, but at the time the texture in my mouth felt good, as if the atoms in it separated like sand that wasn’t tiny rocks.

Millions of tiny
grains of apple.

The surface was jagged and fibrous. It was mars, it was tundra. The landscape of it was wet and white with tiny green spirals shooting up from it, nearly imperceptible. I saw the apple living, I saw every fiber of its being. To the core. I ate it then threw it out. I explained everything about the experience to you. In this way, I told you I still love you. I told you that I am still alive and that I detect in everything some form of life.

The winter season
changes me annually.
Without
fail.
Receding
fall.

I imagine you in your city and I, in mine. We don’t have apple trees, but we have apples. I realize now that the white jagged landscape is really your concrete jungle a few hours north. I devoured the thing, devoured you. The whole episode was exceedingly strange. It resisted… interpretation.

I kick myself
today.
I wanted
the apple for
breakfast.

Somewhere in a black hole there is brilliant light that can’t escape. It is there that you and I exist in the same perpetual moment. It is there, squinting with my hand above my eyes to shield them from the light, that I tell you I love you over and over. I eat the same endless apple.