Poem | Kingdom
August again, the apples now heavy enough to let go, jostled by gusts that herald a monsoon in this high desert. The post Poem | Kingdom appeared first on Moment Magazine.
Black News 
There’s no stopping time. The ordinary hours pass, the months—details dimming like remnants of a dream—yet a single encounter may linger in our memories for decades. Leslie Ullman’s “Kingdom” conjures such a moment in a garden strewn with apples. —Jody Bolz, Poetry Editor
KINGDOM
August again, the apples now heavy enough
to let go, jostled by gusts that herald a monsoon
in this high desert. Sometimes the rain curtain falls
in town or higher up the mountain, and it’s just wind
that roils the evening to loosen the fruit, too much
to gather. We’ll do it later, we say—but we don’t,
thinking the deer might like it, which they do.
Only yesterday, a tender doe came to the yard, not
minding me sitting twenty yards away. She picked up
a windfall too gently to pierce its skin, dropped it
and tried again until her teeth teased out the sugars.
She met my eyes, taking my silence into those pooled depths,
her elegant ears pricked forward. If kindness had a face,
it would have eyes like hers, cautious but inclined to trust.
No forked whisper sliced the air, no jealous mandate
forbade any creature from partaking of the fruit. The cats
observed without stalking; a wasp brushed my hand and
returned to the petunias. Later, startled by a black widow
beside a bookshelf, her web a mess of dirty silk and dead flies,
I thought of that moment in the garden—how I might
have been Eve—and the deer so harmless in her hungers.
Leslie Ullman is the author of seven book-length poetry collections, a chapbook and a book of essays on craft, Library of Small Happiness. Her most recent book of poems is Unruly Tree (University of New Mexico Press, 2024). A former university professor, she lives in Taos, New Mexico.
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