Four words in, the poem has already doubted itself. "i love you" is one of the most worn-out sentences in the language, and Neil Myers lets it stand alone for a line before asking "what words / can say it". The rest of "Apples" works as an answer. If love can't be spoken adequately, the poem will build it from rivers, trees, storms and children instead.
The first stanza is brisk, almost harsh. "forget it soon" could describe the fate of the words themselves, or the speaker telling himself to drop the attempt, and the poem doesn't choose. Then comes "the body disposes / banalities", which makes the body a stricter editor than speech, something that throws clichés away. The stanza ends on an unsettling comparison: "comfortless as angels / & violent." These are not greeting-card angels but something vast and alarming. It is unclear whether the phrase attaches to the banalities, the body or love itself, and that uncertainty helps. Love here is not cosy.
The second stanza loosens and widens. "the reposed granite / swinging for ages" packs a contradiction into a few words: rock at rest, yet swinging, as if geological time were a very slow pendulum. Then "the river edge stunned / by curtains of blackbirds" turns a flock into stage drapery and strikes the bank dumb. The speaker is overwhelmed in the same way: "my eye my tongue / stop confused." Having asked which words could say love, his tongue literally halts.
From there the speaker acts rather than explains. He is "nursing these trees" and trying "to call gently / from another winter / spring / out of the sand". The verbs are tender, but the setting is bleak: roads, cold forests, sand. Spring has to be coaxed out of almost nothing. The passage ends with "a bodiless / perch for singing", which reads like a description of the poem itself, a weightless place where song can rest.
That perch is where the central promise sits: "no one will part us / one from the other". The examples that follow are telling: "the storm from the shaking / thunder from children terrified." These are pairs that cannot be pulled apart, a storm and the trembling it causes. The lovers' bond is therefore compared to cause and effect, not sweetness. It is inevitable rather than gentle, and the frightened children keep the earlier violence in view. Yet the children are also given a future: "they will come to it too / their own answers / hidden under these bridges." The answers are tucked beneath structures built for crossing, so the next generation will have to find them for itself.
The last line refuses to console: "we are our own gardens / & the icefloes that fall." The word "apples" never appears in the poem. The title has to be inferred from the trees, the spring and the gardens, and it perhaps carries the old association of fruit with knowledge and loss, though that is a reading rather than something the text states. What the final line does say is that the same people hold growth and the falling ice. Love and damage are not kept in separate places.
The form supports this. There is no punctuation, no capital letters, and no rhyme. The poem relies on short lines, breath and sound instead. Echoes such as "curtains of blackbirds", "storm" and "shaking", and "thunder" and "terrified" tie the images together, and the ampersands keep the pace quick and conversational. The stray fragment "the tone" is left hanging, as if the speaker is still searching for the right pitch.
What makes "Apples" worth reading is that it turns failure into method. It opens with the phrase it distrusts, admits that phrase is not enough, and then gets the feeling across anyway, through images that are tender, frightening and unresolved.