William Carlos Williams
Perfection
O lovely apple!
beautifully and completely
rotten
hardly a contour marred--
perhaps a little
shrivelled at the top but that
aside perfect
in every detail! O lovely
apple! what a
deep and suffusing brown
mantles that
unspoiled surface! No one
has moved you
since I placed you on the porch
rail a month ago
to ripen.
No one. No one!
William Carlos Williams, The Collected
Poems of William Carlos Williams, New
Directions Publishing, 1938.