There are two apple trees in my yardand I am thinking of what it meansto be alive in this world,the pleasures of secrecyliving among the floraeI bow low from a professional trainingand citizenry of lonelinessto the dark red apples, the waspson the ground.I remember one of my friendswho said he went to the Humane Societyand told them I’ll take the dogno one else wants. A beautiful red houndcould be found leaping aroundin his truck cab, barking at everything.One day that friend left classand never came back — angryat something someone said I thinkor maybe just tired, as I so often am,of the whole effort of scrutinizing the dream.But I like the look of the rawhide antennae,the tilted femurs,the dangling empty cocoon husksand warty lichen specimenthat cover the apple trees.Last year, only three appleswere born between themand they grew high up whereno one could reach. Not one blossomdid I see. Only ticks that leaptonto the thick summer grassand on our necks.The quiet of trees is like the quietest girl in gym classstanding against the retracted bleachers,a moldy copy of Freud’sCivilization and Its Discontents in her hands,in which a handwritten receipt to her dead fatheris tucked into section two as a bookmark.When the wind blows I stand very stilland hold up a tiny plastic wand.Bubbles scatter across the yard for my daughter tochase — she herself said she was a dogthat kept escaping my leash,returning and growling, getting just close enoughfor me to almost catchso she could escape again.I wanted to play but I was troubledby a line I’d written almost ten years agoand had published — it’s too lateto change it now. When you writeyou try to make sure it’s readybefore you serve itthat at its center it isn’t rawwith a bloody spot at the tipof a pale artery, slopping into prosewhose very nature can beto think it can clarifythe insoluble fragment —it’s so tempting,when considering the suffering,to go prose. To speak of it like that.I want to defend against the old habit.I want to get it not right, but near.Speaking a little freely about nothingor the way roots go downas our beliefs do among a secret,while above we make a strange theorywe cannot get right. Butgive me a poem, I ask my daughter.Her pause like a river: wide, fresh and coppery off the mountain.The trees are flying to the poetry!, she says at last,and rushes on.