Nothing much happens in "The Year the Apples Fell." A person walks through an orchard, brushes against branches, and ends up with a full bag of fruit. Yet the poem keeps pressing on one idea: some years, good things simply land in your lap, and the poem makes you feel how rare and strange that is. The speaker does nothing to earn it. "No matter what I did," the apples fall anyway, and by the end she is standing still, "bemused," while the harvest comes to her.
The poem's shape carries much of its meaning. It has three stanzas of very different lengths: eight lines, then twelve, then four. The long middle stanza is where memory interrupts. It looks back at years when the apples "hit the ground" and were left to "wasps, mice, / possums, the foraging deer," and it folds in two losses: a sister's death and the clearing out of a mother's garden when the parents left "the old house for the condo." These are mentioned almost in passing, with dashes and a clause that trails off ("and tried not to cry"). The speaker never explains the connection between those sorrows and the apples. She simply sets them between two scenes of ease, so the grief sits inside the abundance, which is perhaps how it feels to remember it. The phrase "every last one" is a small exaggeration, the sort a person makes when sad. In those years it felt as if nothing was saved.
There is a nice irony here, too. In the bad years the apples are called "wasted," yet the list of creatures that eat them suggests otherwise, since nothing is truly lost to the orchard. "Wasted" is a human judgment, made by someone who needed the harvest to mean something. That makes the speaker's reversal more interesting. The apples fall in both kinds of year. What changes is that this time she is holding something under them.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular metre. It is free verse that moves at the pace of speech, and its lines are often broken in the middle of a thought ("the one / my sister died"), which gives it a hesitant, confiding feel. The first stanza, though, is full of motion. Its verbs come one after another: the apples "shake loose, / roll down my brown-sweatered arm, / glance off my shoulder / and into the turquoise canvas." You can nearly trace the path of each apple along the line breaks. Then comes the short, steady sentence "The bag filled, and filled," where the repeated verb stretches out the sense of accumulation. Compare that with the deliberately flat "But this year, / for a change, something different." The wording is almost shrugging, as though the speaker doesn't quite trust her luck enough to describe it grandly.
Colour does quiet work too. The brown sweater and the apples' red are autumn colours, but the "turquoise canvas" bag is a bright, unexpected note, an ordinary object that suddenly seems almost festive. The oddest word choice is "globules," a clinical word for something round and drop-like, and it makes the apples seem both strange and shiny. It is also slightly funny, which stops the ending from turning syrupy. Only in the last two lines does the poem finally use comparisons: the apples are "red and ready, like blessings, / like easy autumn dreams." The alliteration of "red and ready" sounds like relief. Because the poem has been so literal until then, the similes feel earned, and the word "blessings" arrives almost as a surprise to the speaker herself.
The poem is significant because it treats good fortune with the same honesty that other poems give to sorrow. It does not claim that the apples make up for a dead sister or a lost family home, and it does not offer a lesson. It simply notices that after hard years, an easy one can come, and that the right response may be to stand quietly under the trees, looking up. The title says "fell," a word that usually suggests loss, and the poem lets it mean the opposite. For a reader, the lasting impression is of grace as something you are given rather than something you achieve.