Two Apple Poems, by Linda Eve Diamond

This is Not an Apple, by Rene Magritte (Belgium) 1964

The Treachery of Images, by Rene Magritte (Belgium) 1928

Surreally Good Apple

While waiting for Magritte in his garden studio,
I pluck an apple from a canvas
and eat it.

Magritte enters and sees me devouring the apple,
beside a freshly unpainted canvas, and shouts
about how that image was clearly marked 
not an apple!

I didn’t see that. It just looked delicious
and it was.

He points to a pipe and tries to explain 
the treachery of images. 

What treachery? All I see is a pipe I could 
reach out and touch, so I pick it up 
and light it.

Magritte stares blankly at me and the second 
emptied canvas. “Do you know how long 
it took me to create that apple? That pipe?”

“It’s just that you’re so good,” I say.
“These were so real, but I don’t get
the other stuff,” I admit, with a puff,
and ask him to explain.

“It’s all surreal,” he answers
with a broad, sweeping stroke. 
“Well,” I say, “the apple and pipe 
are so real, but the rest, I really don’t get.”

“It’s all surreal,” he repeats, waving his paintbrush,
spraying the room with applesauce and ash,
spinning in the space of impossible portraits
and wild absurdities, apples, clouds, boulders
floating without the slightest care for reality
or the serious nature of gravity, “Surreal! 
Surreal! It’s all surreal.” 

“Okay, it’s so real,” I agree, to be polite,
adding, “Maybe it’s me. I don’t get a lot of art.”

But the apple and the pipe
I enjoyed immensely. 

Linda Eve Diamond
​
This poem first appeared in Encore: Prize Poems 2019. 

Linda Eve Diamond’s poetry has been honored with several awards, including Grand Prize Award in the Artists Embassy International Dancing Poetry Contest “for exceptional poetry that inspires dance and for furthering intercultural understanding and peace through the universal language of the arts.” Her poetry has been published by numerous literary journals and websites. Find her poetry collections, selected poems and more at http://LindaEveDiamond.com.