by Kelly Gray
The leaving was such that each apple
in the orchard glassed over into ghost-form
on a single night. Centers rotted, dropped out,
only translucent orbs at the end of wooded knots remained.
A buck arrives, noses them to the ground.
His only want: to hear the shatter. First my grandmother,
then my brother. A permanent Autumn settles across my face.
Brinks become a fabric to dress in.
I practice sewing parts of my body shut:
the mouth, an ear, the space between my fingers.
At the edge of the orchard I find an owl.
Bring my hands around the middle of the algid body,
between my palms it moves as dead things move.
Still, I’m gentle as I walk the owl out of the orchard
to the place of bramble and stumps. Lay the bird out like a boat,
like a baby in the arms, like a dirge.
Slow gold light slips,
the night freeze blackens fruit trees.
I continue to visit the owl. The spiders come.
The flies, too. For a moment one of the owl’s eyes opens.
I look through the eye into the back of his death,
parts of flight and story leak out.
The collapse of the left lung: green.
The collapse of the right lung: sky.
I’ve only ever had one good dream
in 46 years of bad dreams and it was of sleeping
in a moon field with my daughter while friends
placed inocybe between my teeth.
The eye of the owl closes.
The buck says it’s peaceful here, to be with you like this.
I don’t say anything because I don’t speak anymore.
Within a streak of light, wasps fly out of the ground
as leaves fall in the orchard.
I become a ghost apple at the nose of a buck.
Kelly Gray is the author of Instructions for the Animal Body (Moon Tide Press, 2021) and Tiger Paw, Tiger Paw, Knife, Knife (Quarter Press, 2022), and The Mating Calls //of the// Specter, which was the recipient of the Tusculum Review Chapbook Prize. Her writing can be found in Cream City Review, Southern Humanities Review, Cherry Tree, Lunch Ticket, and The Northwest Review, among other places, and she is the recipient of the Neutrino Prize from Passages North, the ArtSurround Cohort Grant, and a participant in the 2023 Kenyon Review Poetry Workshop. She has a forthcoming collection which features this poem coming out in spring of 2025.
This poem previously appeared in Jet Fuel Review.