I picked a yellow apple once… rose blush high upon its cheek… firm of flesh… full and round… heavy in my hand.

 Cold from mornings before the frost, it hurt my teeth to bite it. Juice dripped from my chin… rolled down the river of one finger… arced into the dust, a splashed pattern.

I took another bite… and, then, another until it was gone… memory of dappled sun and green leaves… sweet and crisp.

All gone.

I tossed the core at the side of the road… picked up two stones instead.

Wrote ‘fear’ on one, ‘peace’ on the other… threw ‘fear’ off a bridge into a roiling stream churning mud and brown foam… did not wait for it to sink.

‘Peace,’ smooth and cool, kept dark in the ridges of my closed hand.

The fate of all clutched things, one day I could no longer find it.

Soon I found another, and, then, another… learned not to keep them in that darkness… gave them all away.

In each stone the silence after the volcano… glaciers advancing with a deafening crack. Mountains had fallen upon them… violent water carrying them to gentle places… smoothed by the haunting song of whipping desert sands.

I returned where once I tossed the apple core. An apple tree had grown there… the seed wriggling out of desiccated core…

a tiny bellows in and out… dropping to the earth that claimed it because it was its nature.

Many seasons later… a tree.

I picked a yellow apple… rose blush high upon its cheek… sat down on the cold ground beneath the apple tree.

Infinite horizon bare of green… earth joined to sky… in one hand, the apple… in the other hand, a stone.

The dry leaves fading to yellow… speckled black drift on air… fall upon my face… cover me, arising and descending with each breath I take.

The smell of snow is in the air.