Pomology
I will eat the apple
read Stephen’s note this morning.
He is volunteering to play Eve.
He wrote, I will eat the apple
—but there are no apples in the house.
We have no lascivious Honeycrisp,
no bonny Braeburn, no upright Baldwin.
We’re out of spry Granny Smiths,
the skulking Northern Spy,
or the mysterious Pink Lady.
Stephen does have an Adam’s apple
and I have an Apple computer,
but you can’t compare apples and oranges.
The note said, I will eat the apple.
Perhaps Stephen’s chasing out the doctors.
Perhaps he’s not falling far from the tree.
Or he’s already eaten from the tree of knowledge:
in Latin, malum means both apple
and evil. I think Stephen is sending a warning.
He means, I will protect you.
He writes, I will eat the apple.
Copyright © 2017 by Kim Roberts. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 10, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
“This poem really did start with a cryptic text message from my housemate. But I was thinking, as well, of the forbidden fruit in the Genesis story that tradition suggests was an apple, but scholars now suggest was more likely an apricot.”
—Kim Roberts
Kim Roberts
Kim Roberts is the author of six books of poems, most recently Corona/Crown (WordTech Editions, 2023), a cross-disciplinary collaboration with photographer Robert Revere, and The Scientific Method (WordTech, 2017). She is editor of the anthology By Broad Potomac’s Shore: Great Poems from the Early Days of our Nation’s Capital (University of Virginia Press, 2020), selected by the East Coast Centers for the Book for the 2021 Route One Reads program as the book that “best illuminates important aspects” of the culture of Washington, D.C.