The orchard sparks with death, spills an apple, huge in my hand. Grapes withered and sweet as autumn love brush my thigh—everything falls together. Last night the ghost of George Ryga curled around me as I lay sleepless in his bed. This morning—forever darlings—you bloom through loneliness. At the other end of the orchard a farmer boxes the morning’s pick, loads them grunting onto a flat-bed. Between my feet, apples rot. In the branches above they glisten in a ballet of leaves— the absent, dead, living— we all shuffle the same space synchronized in each other’s reflection. When we spoke over the phone you said you wanted to come live here, to fill the days with crates of fruit, prune with your father’s hands, gnarled as they were when you were our youngest son’s age. You want to come here to me to go back there to walk forward into fields of flame. In the kitchen at Ryga House I wash and slice the apple fragrant and crisp as orchard air, the sheets of George Ryga’s bed, your words on the phone with our children beside you listening to distances converge.