In my last post, I was celebrating the generous review of Habitats, my new poetry collection, that is featured in the latest issue of Tupelo Quarterly. The kind reviewer, Robert Dunsdon, spent some time discussing the poem, “After Apple-Picking,” which I wrote to honor my late father, Richard O. Whitcomb. “After Apple-Picking” is of course an homage to the poem by Robert Frost, a moving monologue about aging.
My poem was one of the ones in Habitats that was not published in a journal before the book’s publication. I didn’t have the chance to share it with a larger audience before the book came out. So I thought I’d include the text of the poem here and record myself reading it.
After Apple-Picking
Three time zones between us:
early darkness and your early dinners—
you’re lining up with the others at 4:45.
I’m in my early afternoon meeting;
I hope your ribs are healing from the fall you
took before Thanksgiving. I know
each day you just try to button your pants or
walk in a straight line or get to the phone
in time to answer it. The person on the
other end is asking you for money
& you can hardly hear her anyway:
a charity, some PAC, that insurance
rep, talking too fast to be understood
by a 92-year-old man going deaf. So
you repeat I can’t understand you & hang up.
Sometimes your mouth won’t form words;
sometimes you forget to get into the bed
& you sleep on top of the covers, cold.
Hard to even look at the calendar
when the days slam down all the same:
hard to get up & hard to stand. I bend
my head to the vision of my father,
a young man running beside my bike,
& before that, the younger man strolling
in Boston, handsome as a candidate,
wearing loafers, cigarette in hand.
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