Pratt's first stanza will not let an apple stay perfect for long. It opens at the peak, with "perfect tart pink-striped green crisp ripe," a run of adjectives with no commas, so the words tumble out as fast as the fruit ripens. By the next line the apple has become "red-orange candle-wax sweet grainy mush," and the last line says how quickly: "in the time it takes to count one hundred yellow-boxed bushels." From the start, harvest is a race. The abundance that fills the boxes is already tipping into decay.
The poem then widens its view, from one apple to the orchard floor, then to the animals, then to the lit house where people sit listening. Its central idea, as I read it, is that harvest is not something humans do alone. What is picked, what falls, what rots and what is left over all belong to one cycle, and the leftovers feed other creatures. The title seems plain, but the poem keeps pushing it past the picker and the bushel box.
The sound of the language carries much of this. In "soft squash plop sounding low below the rustle swish," the heavy, rounded vowels of the falling fruit sit against the hissing consonants of the leaves above. You hear the drop and the rustle separately. Elsewhere the wind "pushes drops / from the tops in a dither of yellow coin leaf," and the leaves-as-coins image makes the orchard pay out its wealth. That prepares the pun in stanza three, where the grass becomes "a windfall river." A windfall is fruit blown down, and also unexpected good fortune. For the mice, rabbits and deer, it is both.
The form supports this sense of crowding. There are four tercets and no end-rhyme, with long, stress-heavy lines that pile up nouns and adjectives. The first and third stanzas have no main verb at all, so they work like snapshots rather than sentences. Compound words are jammed together, such as "windrush," "windfall," "fire-crackle," "applefull," as if the orchard had no room for spaces. Notice too that the word "apple" is withheld until the final stanza. Earlier the reader must infer the fruit from "tart," "crisp" and "drops." When "applewood" and "applefull" arrive, the fruit has become fuel and furnishing, the thing that burns in the grate and fills the house.
The animal list is carefully ordered. The scavengers grow in size, from mice to rabbits to deer, and the deer get the most striking phrase: "furrowing bowing." To furrow is a farmer's word, so the deer are ploughing the grass with their noses. To bow suggests a reverent gesture as well as a grazing posture. The rabbits are "bland-eyed," a flat, mild description that fits their placid feeding. Nobody here is a thief. They are part of the orchard's economy.
Colour also threads through the poem. Green gives way to red-orange, then yellow in the boxes and leaves, then yellow-brown in the grass. In the last stanza the "orange red flame" in the hearth echoes the fruit's overripe colours, so the apple's decay is answered by warmth. The indoor stanza slows everything down with "sitting still," after the "windrush" and "dither" of the earlier lines. The final line, "we hear them under the half-moon gleam, gleaning," rests on a chime between "gleam" and "gleaning." Gleaning traditionally means gathering what the reapers have left behind. Here the animals do it, and the human "we" can only listen. The poem doesn't say how the listeners feel, but their stillness suggests acceptance rather than annoyance. That is my inference from the tone, not something the poem states.
The poem's quiet strength is that it gives the end of harvest to the creatures who had no hand in it. It gathers a whole season into twelve lines and makes ripeness and rot, the picker and the scavenger, feel like parts of one generous process. And it ends on a sound rather than a sight, as though the best way to understand the orchard is to sit in the dark and listen.