Pomme Prisonniere

Five years to the hour since I was a bride,
we eat wood mushrooms from the same damp

atmosphere that brought our tongues out of the dark
and into each other's mouths. Some nights, my lips

are a small red bonfire. Other nights, they frost
over the mattress, the color of ice-dew.

Do not imagine I am an external thinker
or that I have lost the taste for fat snails in butter.

The wave and stasis of loving can strip a whelk,
hungry for the curve of a private afternoon.

But tonight, candlelight ignites my agate earrings.
And when, for dessert, our waiter brings calvados,

two glasses on the house, I feel the whole apple tree
in my mouth. Leaves that unfold and flower

against the tailbone. Roots that hold fast to our tongues
and join them together. All this, from a single fruit

grown in a bottle: pomme prisonniere.
Like a body, floating knees to chest, head angled down

as it holds its breath in delicious agony.
And that, my love, is how I keep my stem from breaking.

Copyright © 2004 Tenaya Darlington All rights reserved
from The Kenyon Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission