Apples and Gypsy earrings

"How about them apples,"
the girl with the Gypsy earrings
was heard to say in a common language
all too familiar to men of a certain charm.
being the apple of her eye, i claimed to be familiar with
all the varieties she kept hidden underneath her piano.
in fact, i loved her apples and often thought of decorating them
with shiny cloth and sequins to suggest the sparkle of
wet lips about to take a hasty bite, or maybe, possibly,
the stems should be adorned with fringes, and the skins
with Spanish tassels, for a more progressive
mark on taste than that left by dull orchard growers.
once, bobbing for apples toward the end of a Halloween party,
i kept tactfully quiet when asked if i wanted the red one.
almost from the start, the color never was important.
and thinking about an apple a day has kept me healthy,
especially when i look onto my tree-shaded garden and,
nearby, see the Gypsy girl dancing against the sunlit sky.