Recently, I've been re-reading (for about the hundredth time) a collection of poetry by the late Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai. Amichai was assigned reading during my first creative writing class ever (in college), and I can remember so clearly reading one particular poem of his, "Inside the Apple," for the first time. It was printed all crooked on that extra-thin 8X10 you always got at the school copy place. To me, it's a perfect poem. You know how sometimes things are just precisely in the key of you? Sometimes I wish I could read it with someone else's brain; I love it so much, I wish I could meet it again. But anyway, here it is:

Inside the Apple

You visit me inside the apple. Together we can hear the knife paring around and around us, carefully, so the peel won’t tear.

You speak to me. I trust your voice because it has lumps of hard pain in it the way real honey has lumps of wax from the honeycomb.

I touch your lips with my fingers: that too is a prophetic gesture. And your lips are red, the way a burnt field is black. It’s all true.

You visit me inside the apple and you’ll stay with me inside the apple until the knife finishes its work.