first apple blossoms

I looked out of my window this morning, and there they were.

Delicate. Succulent. Pink-white candle flames glowed on the ends of the apple-tree branches. Flirted with the chilly morning air.

They make me smile. Fill me with that wordless radiance that flowering trees induce. The plum trees are in flower too, along all the streets I walk each day. And the Japanese cherry trees. Several times this week, I've found small white cherry flowers caught in my hair when I come indoors.

From Blossoms

Someone sent me this poem today, by one of my favourite poets, Li-Young Lee.

I quote his work frequently. His lines float up in my mind regularly. Last week, his visceral thunderstorm-opera of a poem, The City In Which I Love You, was beating through my brain and gut.

And your otherness is perfect as my death.
Your otherness exhausts me,
like looking suddenly up from here
to impossible stars fading.
Everything is punished by your absence.

This one, which I haven't read before, made me smile, several times, in delighted recognition. Click through the links in the lines, to share each journey, each sensory memory, his words and images evoke.

From Blossoms

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the joy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

Li-Young Lee