An apple tree high on a hill and pithy with age

toppled over, and as it fell it flung out one

last apple, tough as a baseball, and it bounced 

 

downhill and rolled and stopped against a rock

where over the winter it came apart at the seams

and spilled its seeds. And one of the seeds found

 

a damp spot under the side and sprouted there,

and soon, by the measurements of sky and clouds,

it became a tiny apple tree that was already

 

trying to elbow the rock aside. And there it grew,

wild in the wind down the hill, scattering petals,

white with pink centers, with pea-sized knobs

 

behind those blossoms that by summer would be

apples. And the tree grew and grew, and grew

even more, and thousands of honeybees came

 

and went, and in winter deer scuffed in the snow

for the apples it dropped, but the tree grew old

and weak, as had the first tree, and it fell,

 

and one of its leathery apples rolled downhill,

and lay patiently under the snow where the deer

couldn’t find it, and in the spring it also sprouted

​

becoming a tree, just a small one, but with hope,

and it grew there, a hundred feet down the slope

from the original tree, which by then was no more

 

than a damp brown heap of bark and branches,

and this cycle continued, each apple sapling

lifting out of the skin of the last apple, and each

 

sprouting a few more yards downhill until

maybe a dozen generations later, an apple tree

came up at the foot of the hill where they’d all

 

been going, and it leaned against an old stone wall

at a meadow’s edge, pushing against the wall

but not able to move it, and that tree too,

 

as it grew, dropped its fruit in the long grass

around it, the deer coming far down the hill

to find them there, and then finally, as a very,

 

very old tree soon to lie in the shade

it bent over its very last apple, dropped over

the wall, and what was the name of that tree?

 

It was called the Seek-No-Further, and someone

found one of the last ones, long ago, but you

might seek and find one, too, at the foot

of a wall, still young with maybe two leaves only,

open like hands, on the warm sunny side.

 

Loosely based on a passage from Eric Sloane’s book, A Reverence for Wood, Wilfred Funk, Inc., New York, 1965.