Crabapples

// Kevin Casey

Now the evening settles, silent, ashamed
of the failed day it seeks to smother.
Only crabapples complain, and fall,

and strike the woodshed’s roof —
wry punctuations to rob the dying sun
of any dignity. Overripe, the moon

bleeds a thin and saccharin screed
across the pockmarks of stars, and so I
weave dead husks of minutes, and so I

burnish my own cold bones with straw
and tender-knuckled fists of horsehair,
then shake the azure bole of night,

to make crabapples rain upon this
desiccated landscape.