Cathryn Essinger

I planted an apple tree in memory of my mother, who is not gone, but whose memory has become so transparent that she remembers slicing apples with her grandmother (yellow apples; blue bowl) better than the fruit that I hand her today. Still, she polishes the surface with her thumb, holds it to the light and says with no hesitation,Oh, Yellow Transparent . . . they're so fragile, you can almost see to the core. She no longer remembers how to roll the crust, sweeten the sauce, but her desire is clear—it is pie that she wants. And so, I slice as close as I dare to the core— to that little cathedral to memory—where the seeds remember everything they need to know to become yellow and transparent.

I do not understand the poets who tell me that I should not personify. Every morning the willow auditions for a new role outside my bedroom window—today she is Clytemnestra; yesterday a Southern Belle, lost in her own melodrama, sinking on her skirts. Nor do I like the mathematicians who tell me I cannot say, "The zinnias are counting on their fingers," or "The dog is practicing her geometry," even though every day I watch her using the yard's big maple as the apex of a triangle from which she bisects the circumference of the lawn until she finds the place where the rabbit has escaped, or the squirrel upped the ante by climbing into a new Euclidian plane. She stumbles across the lawn, eyes pulling her feet along, gaze fixed on a rodent working the maze of the oak as if it were his own invention, her feet tangling in the roots of trees, and tripping, yes, even over themselves, until I go out to assist, by pointing at the squirrel, and repeating, "There! There!" But instead of following my outstretched arm to the crown of the tree, where the animal is now lounging under a canopy of leaves, catching its breath, charting its next escape, she looks to my mouth, eager to read my lips, confident that I—who can bring her home from across the field with a word, who can speak for the willow and the zinnia— can surely charm a squirrel down from a tree.