re:Virals 489

Welcome to re:Virals, The Haiku Foundation’s weekly commentary feature on some of your favorites among the best contemporary haiku and senryu written in English. This week’s poem, chosen by Harrison Lightwater, was:

     
fleeting autumn 
we eat the apples 
meant for a pie          
—Susan Yavaniski
 haikuKATHA #39, 22 January 2025

Introducing this poem, Harrison writes:

I remembered that Keith keeps a few candidates in case of need.  I was curious to see what he would offer.  This one appealed straight away. It’s just the sort of thing I would do.

Opening comment:

On first reading this, I experienced that hard-to-explain visceral feeling that the poet hit the spot. I’m not going to spend time on whether it is more senryu than haiku. It has the spirit of both.

The nub of it is in lines two and three. “We eat the apples meant for a pie” is so very human.  Spontaneous, gentle, universal, with warm humour, and suggesting much.  There is endearing delinquency, mingled pleasure and vague guilt.  Like children yielding to delicious temptation, we give ourselves over to the moment and choose gratification now over something intended for later.  As we spend on a treat rather than save for a pension.

These plain words, not grand, not figurative, are set against the poetic “fleeting autumn” in the opening line. I suspected that this was sought and thought about  in subsequent composition. It is felicitously chosen and adds both seasonality and transience (the life of the perfect apple is short).  It is also a contrast in style that in itself has latent humour, setting up the reader for the following everyday phrase.  Apples are a seasonal reference by convention, but the reality is that they are available at almost any time of the year. “Fleeting autumn” is not redundant here, but fixes the season as well as furnishing a foil for the gentle human humour that follows. I couldn’t help recalling William Carlos Williams scoffing all the plums in “This is just to say.”

Then, perhaps, so much depends on the word “meant.” It’s open to the reader to speculate on decision, command, and destiny as well as disobedience.  And the final mischievous thought that the wholesome fresh shiny apples might be better for us than a pie with just the right amount of sugar and lemon juice, perhaps some blackberries, the pastry all golden-brown and glazed, fresh from the oven, with a little double cream.  Or chilled and served with a capful of Cointreau (tip!) and a wedge of vanilla ice-cream.  Either way rejecting the ascetic life and self-denial of the exemplary hermit sage.

With originality, and a favourite!

Dan Campbell:

This poem reminds me of the classic marshmallow test in psychology, where children were given a choice: eat one marshmallow now or wait and get two later. The ability to delay gratification, to resist the immediate pleasure for something even better, is linked to self-regulation and long-term success. But I have learned that—sometimes, immediate pleasure isn’t a bad choice.

That’s where the beauty of fleeting autumn comes in. Autumn is a season of transition, a reminder that ripeness doesn’t last forever. Some fruits are best enjoyed in their purest form. Maybe the apples in this poem are at their absolute peak, so perfect that baking them would only dull their brilliance. In that case, eating them now isn’t about impatience—it’s about appreciation.

And isn’t that true of life? Sometimes, we need discipline and patience. Other times, we need to seize the sweetness in front of us before it’s gone. There is no single “right” choice. Maybe the real takeaway is that balance is key.

Life teaches us that we must learn when to indulge in the present and when to invest in the future. Whether we eat the apples now or bake them into a pie, the most important thing is to be fully present in our choice. Because in the end, both the first crisp bite of an apple and the first warm slice of pie deserve to be savored completely.

Rupa Anand:

The kigo in L1 immediately connects with the rest of the verse.  Apples and autumn are closely connected as autumn is the apple-abundant season! Apple orchards are ready for harvest in the fall when the leaves change colour and the air gets crisp.

What can we do with apples? We can eat them fresh, make apple sauce or bake them in pies or custards.  The kigo links the mood of the poem to its concrete image of eating apples in L 2. So far so good.  Then comes the turnaround, the surprise in L3.  The toriawase – heck, these apples were originally meant for baking. However, they are chomped down and eaten fresh before the poet gets around to the discipline of putting them together into a pie.

I catch a rhythm here, a sense of urgency, a movement, a swiftness between L1 & L2. Autumn is fleeting and there seems to be no time to chop, peel, assemble and bake. Maybe, a tinge of wabi in the simplicity of the image.  As a reader, I stopped to think: hey, what happened here? The apples were meant to be eaten, weren’t they? Who cares whether fresh or in a pie!

Melissa Dennison:

I sense a playful note here. Autumn is transient, fleeting and so are the apples, instead of being stored, kept for the pie they disappear; happily scoffed in an instant. Possibly with a few giggles.

Nice bit of repetition, too, in the ‘e’ sounds of fleeting, eat and meant.

It’s a bit naughty, I think. I hope whoever did that didn’t get into trouble.

There is a deeper meaning, isn’t there, regarding the brevity of life?  How everything is fleeting, and gone before we know it. Beautiful and enjoyable while it lasts. Let’s learn from this and live in this moment, before it’s gone forever.

Jo McInerney—seize the day:

Seasons have always varied, but in the perilously placed world in which we all now live nothing can be taken for granted.

Susan Yavaniski’s haiku deftly upends the English readers’ cultural touchstone of Keats’ ‘To Autumn’, a lingering ‘season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’. Yavaniski’s autumn, as her first line simply states, is ‘fleeting’. Her haiku’s opening word rushes by the reader, here and then gone, almost too quickly for us to register what has passed.

The haiku’s response to tempus fugit echoes Horace’s frequently urged injunction to ‘seize the day’ – to live in the moment. Yavaniski’s second line – ‘we eat the apples’ – has the speaker and her companions enjoying or at least consuming while they still can. The simple declarative of line two makes the tone difficult to place. Are the apples being relished or merely swallowed?

Line three – ‘meant for a pie’ – suggests the cost of immediate consumption. The autumn harvest was intended to be savoured, cooked to deepen the flavour, and then encased in pastry. Labour and care could have created something sweet and comforting to be enjoyed as winter approaches.

Yavaniski’s haiku does not condemn those who grasp what they can now. However, it does show something of what is lost. Perhaps, in this time of urgency, what we need is careful, conscious action.

Author Susan Yavaniski:

Once every a year, when the weather turns cold enough to keep me inside more than out, but before the winter holiday season occupies my time and energy, I try to bake an apple pie, from scratch, for myself and my husband. For both of us, it’s not “a” pie, but the pie, the one I’ve perfected over our many decades together: a flaky pastry of kamut and spelt flours worked with cultured butter, encasing a generous mound of lightly-spiced local apples, most of which are Northern Spies, an old Upstate New York variety renowned for pie-baking, hard to find these days and only briefly on the market. As we rarely eat sweets, the pie is a much-anticipated indulgence, which we savor Shaker-style, for breakfast, with a dollop of freshly-whipped cream.

This past October, I purchased the special apples and put them in our cold room, fully expecting to bake the pie any day. But fall proved unseasonably warm here Upstate. Our cold room never got cold, and I was kept outdoors, never finding myself in that particular autumn frame of mind which slows me down and brings me into the kitchen. And so, to avoid the apples softening and going to waste, we ate them — fresh — one by one, here and there. By the time the weather did change, there weren’t enough apples left to bake the pie, and winter was suddenly upon us.

Thanks to all who sent commentaries. As the contributor of the commentary reckoned best this week, Jo has chosen next week’s poem, which you’ll find below. We invite you to write a commentary to it. It may be short, or of moderate length, academic, your personal response, spontaneous, or idiosyncratic.  As long as it focuses on the verse presented, and with respect for the poet, all genuine reader reaction, criticism, and pertinent discussion is of value.   Out-takes are kept in the THF Archives.  Best of all, the chosen commentary’s author gets to pick the next poem.

Anyone can participate. Simply use the re:Virals commentary form below to enter your commentary on the new week’s poem (“Your text”) by the following Tuesday midnight, Eastern US Time Zone, and then press Submit to send your entry. The Submit button will not be available until Name, Email, and Place of Residence fields are filled in. We look forward to seeing your commentary and finding out about your favourite poems.

Poem for commentary:

     
turning down the sheets —
outside Perseids fall
without a sound
— kei andersen
  tsuri-dōrō, Issue #24 – November-December 2024

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Footnote:

Susan Yavaniski’s bio is here in Haikupedia.

Concerning a poetic set-up for contrasting humour from real life, I was minded of Ingrid Beluchi’s

     
forever
             searching
                              for
                                     beginnings
                                                         Scotch
                                                                     tape

…that we had in re:Virals 456. Though they are not directly comparable. This week’s verse is more subtle and produces a warm smile rather than a sudden chuckle.
Both are pleasing.