When the cicada celebrates the heat,
Intoning that tomorrow and today
Are only yesterday with the same dust
To dust on plantain and on roadside yarrow-
Remind me, someone, of the apples coming,
Gold in the dew of deep October grass,
A prophecy of snow in their white flesh.

In the long haze of dog days, or by night
When thunder growls and prowls but will not go
Or come, I lose the memory of apples.
Name me the names, the goldens, russets, sweets,
Pippin and pearmain and seek-no-further
And the lost apples on forgotten farms
And the wild pasture apples of no name.

Robert Francis

1.

The crack is moving down the wall.
Defective plaster isn’t all the cause.
We must remain until the roof falls in.

It’s mildly cheering to recall
That every building has its little flaws.
The crack is moving down the wall.

Here in the kitchen, drinking gin,
We can accept the damndest laws.
We must remain until the roof falls in.

And though there’s no one here at all,
One searches every room because
The crack is moving down the wall.

Repairs? But how can one begin?
The lease has warnings buried in each clause.
We must remain until the roof falls in.

These nights one hears a creaking in the hall,
The sort of thing that gives one pause.
The crack is moving down the wall.
We must remain until the roof falls in.

—Weldon Kees

I can’t stop thinking about the woman in New Mexico
who discovered the face of Jesus on a tortilla
and how her husband stopped drinking due to the tortilla,
the parish priest blessed the tortilla
and tried to duplicate the face on his own tortilla.
A miracle and people are still coming to see the tortilla.
They call it “Jesus on a Tortilla”
like a Saturday special in an all-night luncheonette.
We have been so broke lately
if it happened to us
we would eat the tortilla.
We would forget pilgrimages, the AP, the UPI.
Anyway, maybe it would be the proper thing—
to eat the tortilla—
why else would Jesus appear on a tortilla
and not on a chair, a fountain pen,
a classic cashmere sweater.
No, he’s always making the rounds in bread.

It’s like when you go into a bakery and say
I’ll take one of those, and two of these
and three of the little rabbit-earred custard ones.
He must have said: I’ll try a tortilla
in the home of a poor family.
Now I’m checking all my pancakes, my bagels, my buns.
I may have eaten some of the saints and the famous already.
Often after a good meal I’ll get a glow.
There’s no telling who’s being taken in.

Lee Upton

More Ellen Bass! My friend Liz posted one of these videos on Facebook this morning. “C22” is one of my favorite of her poems; I read it first in the Missouri Review.

“The Thing Is,” a poem by Ellen Bass, is now available as a broadside. Proceeds benefit Syracuse Cultural Workers.