''I am drawn to paintings that catch glimpses of ordinary people in rooms that lead to other rooms,'' Beverley Bie Brahic says. Apple Thieves is full of such painterly moments, remembered or caught on the fly, with their charge of mystery, like this shell - ''an empty house / a nudge will set rocking / almost indefinitely'' - collected on the coast of her native British Columbia, whose diverse populations and their migrations she evokes in ''Root Vegetables''. Today, long resident in France, she relishes Paris - ''Smelling of piss and baking bread / The city in its glory and dereliction'' - ''time-hedged cottages'' and the earthbound in all its fragility.