They are walking in the woods along the coast and in a grassy meadow, wasting, they come upon two old neglected apple trees. Moss thickened every bough and the wood of the limbs looked rotten but the trees were wild with blossom and a green fire of small new leaves flickered even on the deadest branches. Blue-eyes, poppies, a scattering of lupine flecked the meadow, and an intricate, leopard-spotted leaf-green flower whose name they didn't know. Trout lily, he said; she said, adder's-tongue. She is shaken by the raw, white, backlit flaring of the apple blossoms. He is exultant, as if some thing he felt were verified, and looks to her to mirror his response. If it is afternoon, a thin moon of my own dismay fades like a scar in the sky to the east of them. He could be knocking wildly at a closed door in a dream. She thinks, meanwhile, that moss resembles seaweed drying lightly on a dock. Torn flesh, it was the repetitive torn flesh of appetite in the cold white blossoms that had startled her. Now they seem tender and where she was repelled she takes the measure of the trees and lets them in. But he no longer has the apple trees. This is as sad or happy as the tide, going out or coming in, at sunset. The light catching in the spray that spumes up on the reef is the color of the lesser finch they notice now flashing dull gold in the light above the field. They admire the bird together, it draws them closer, and they start to walk again. A small boy wanders corridors of a hotel that way. Behind one door, a maid. Behind another one, a man in striped pajamas shaving. He holds the number of his room close to the center of his mind gravely and delicately, as if it were the key, and then he wanders among strangers all he wants.
From The Apple Trees at Olema by Robert Hass. Copyright © 2010 by Robert Hass. Used by permission of Ecco/HarperCollins. All rights reserved.