Origins

A young child holding and eating an apple

What is the history of any thing?
This apple, let's say, that my grandson just picked
as he sits on my shoulders,
feet dangling like parentheses
around my heart?

Its father, a random visitor
guided to mother flower by
Ancient Knowledge,
from a teeming hive of workers
intent on serving their queen,
That was brought to this orchard
by an itinerant keeper who, in spring,
drove a thousand coffee-fueled miles
in under a month, in a truck
badly in need of a muffler,
all the while reliving the
fight he had with his wife
just before he left home,
wishing his cell phone had service.

Whose juice, that drips in my hair
From the boy's first taste of autumn,
mere moments ago flowed through
the veins of this tree,
Which was planted decades before
by a man with three sons,
One of whom he disowned
over what now, in hindsight,
seems trivial.

Not to mention the rain that fell this summer,
broadcast in sheets of lightning and thunder
that woke the baby who lives
in a moldy basement apartment
on the night before her father's
first day of work in more than a year,
when he desperately needed the sleep.

And the sun whose rays
crossed 93 million miles in under ten minutes
to fall on these leaves
and the face of my neighbor
Who, I learned just last week,
has skin cancer.

This child on my shoulders,
I hope, will remember me,
and this day,
so full of sweetness and laughter,
And the simple pleasure of fruit.