All night long, in the close September darkness, The apples fall, Loosening high, Dropping with swiftly-muffled thud Upon the ground. And there is a line of straightness between that high, Still, mysterious loosening and the ground, And at the end of the line the apple, Let down upon the earth, Round upon round -- So that all night straight pillars are dropped, Straight pillars with rounded bases, Which will not show by day. @3So quiet is the loosening One cannot tell at all By the hushed dullness of the thud How long has been the fall. Some hung high and some hung low, Each with a different length to go -- But thud and fall and muffled thud And every sound the same, And never a way for an ear to tell How far an apple came.@1 There is no thought now of red on green, Here in the darkness. There is no pungency of odor coming in At the cool, wide square of black. And the biting into them is unthinkable now -- The crisp sound of teeth in the watery white fibre of the apple -- The juice, the seeds shaped maddeningly black and perfect -- Their crunching sound when chewed. There are no vivid things like sight and taste and smell Here in the thudded dark -- Only the dimmer, deeper, mystic ones Of sound and an imagined touch. Now for a little while that thought of touch must linger -- Of how it feels to the earth to get and hold Its rounded, dropping treasure. There is quick, irrelevant need for an apple curved into The hollow of a palm; And then the soothing sense Of the nest-like place the apple makes In the matted, old September grass. Then touch, too, goes, and there is only Sound, The hush of unseen red onto its unseen green. The darkness, close and near, is punctuate With apples dropping to the ground. @3They fall, but I do not see them, Red on the brown-green ground; And if my ear were stopped with sleep, There would be no sound.@1 And yet, here in the darkness, Unseen, unheard, this would go on. In a hundred long gardens of the earth tonight, Where no ear is, The apples fall. No sight, no taste, no smell -- No rounded touch, no sound -- But apples falling, falling, Falling to the ground. |