'Apple is Tragic'

A good apple is a meal, but good apples are rare. I lived for three years in the state of Washington and never once encountered an apple that wasn’t pulpy and bland. One of the things I miss most about upstate New York, where I lived for almost twenty years, is apple picking. The migrant pickers there are predominantly Jamaican. In 2003, our final autumn in the Northeast, at an orchard near Schuylerville, the pickers had a reggae band and played for customers. That was the day I discovered a variety of apple that has assumed legendary proportions in memory because I’ve never again seen it: the Kendall. The closest is the Honeycrisp, which is delicious but overpriced. I’m resigned to the market reality that good apples, like good tomatoes, will remain elusive.

The website American Life in Poetry, curated by Ted Kooser, has posted a poem by the Ohio poet Cathryn Essinger, “Summer Apples,” which begins memorably: “I planted an apple tree in memory / of my mother, who is not gone . . .” From there it trails away into sentimentality, but in his introduction Kooser remembers a much better poem, “The Crossed Apple” by Louise Bogan. She describes an unlikely hybrid, a potent myth:

“This apple’s from a tree yet unbeholden,

Where two kinds meet,

“So that this side is red without a dapple,

And this side’s hue

Is clear and snowy. It's a lovely apple.

It is for you.”

Yes, a good apple tastes good but it’s also ripe with associations, not all of them Judeo-Christian. Guy Davenport titled a 1984 story collection Apples and Pears. In “Shaker Light,” an essay in The Hunter Gracchus (1996), he writes: “Apple is the symbol of the Fall, pear of Redemption. Apple is the world, pear heaven. Apple is tragic.”