Verdad Magazine Volume 4
Spring 2008, Volume 4
Poetry by Peter Schwartz
core study: notes on an apple
imagination says
in time everything becomes
something else
an apple
sits by my window
for 300 years
one day a woman
takes a bite and
a flock of birds
takes off
it becomes wine
for a monk or the beginning
of an orchard
its life is yours
but has happened as
if in translation
a few steps
from the vertebrate
before you ever
really got to
eat that
apple.
this apple
might scent your
grandmother's skin
at her wake
nervously you
memorize your furniture
as if each piece were a
passenger
on some final
voyage west, straight
into the sunset
of your imagination
the corners
we most live
in crumble
alas some places
are too small
for apples.
once in holland
I saw a painting
of an apple
now some nights
I hang myself on the
wall like a painting
and wait
for a power
greater than
sleep to take
me to my
orchard.
how to survive an execution
I'm transcendent meat
doubt sentenced to a whole
winter outside
the blockhouse
a skeleton of all the sleeping someones
I'll never be lined up against the fence
each facing their private death squad
judgment with cigarettes
in their fingers
after a lifetime of commitment
to nothing more than style I take
on a look of concrete
as if to pave my escape
straight through the eyes
of my oppressors
who joke about my guilt
forgetting they too are apes of fate
in this perpetual fix mixing
noon with midnight until
my watch breaks
like a butterfly
my head swims
beyond the rows of trees
and stone statues
beyond this tired plaza
with its overgrown armory
of wooden benches
and slow fountains
beyond the unmentionable
and immeasurable
beyond the soldiers and pigeons
beyond government
and reason
beyond even the
child playing at the edge
of the courtyard
BIO: Peter Schwartz is a painter, poet and writer. He’s also an associate art editor for Mad Hatters’ Review. His artwork can be seen all over the Internet but specifically at: www.sitrahahra.com. He’s had hundreds of paintings, poems, and stories published both online and in print and is constantly submitting new work as if his very life depended on it. His last show was at the Amsterdam Whitney Gallery in Chelsea NYC.