Someone else was afraid and spoke to me

and I couldn’t answer…swallowing oxygen

from a tube.  And then?  The cool blade

freeing rind from an apple,

like the first touch of day.  How long

I’d been in someone’s still life—the blade

hidden, dividing—and was helpless.

Perfectly drugged, I lay just shy of winter

in my own mind.  My cut chest felt nothing,

no terror, no pain.  And there were morphine’s sweet-

and-fruit boxes piled on the white terrain

like reasons for lives and death.

The orchard was weathered to admonitory bareness

except for a few frozen apples

above a disturbance of snow—the hoof prints

of deer coming by several routes to this late harvest,

the dim haunches and various limbs

afloat on movement that can break

or double back into the gray calm of woods.

How to explain directions a mind takes

or why I told no one how much I wanted

to come back to this beautiful, stupid world?