Wednesday, May 1, 2013

They Call It Shadblow, Sugar Pear, Beach Plum \ Families


Nancy:  Like bursts of flowers, the luxury of enough – of more than enough – the reward for all of us for surviving the long hard winter months.



They Call It Shadblow, Sugar Pear, Beach Plum


Foxes fill themselves with the fruits,
birds toss the branches
rising and falling, rising and falling,
gusting from plenty to plenty.

Coyotes
– my own dogs do this –
draw the clusters of fruit through
their teeth and roll the sweetness
on their tongues.

Even the bears
standing in the thickets, bend the
branches, embrace the branches
and rumble pleasure through full jaws,
purple rivulets of juice.

Maybe, here and there, some woman
thinking cobbler or muffins picks
into an old pan.  An old man
asks me, “Did you get beach plums
this year?”

So much fruit it lies crushed
on the lane.  I can pick fruit,
suck on it, spit seeds, remember
the lane white with petals, remember
snow up to my hips.

I never expected to be so lucky,
to live in a place so demanding,
so hard and stony, yes, and yes,
so quick and rich and sweet.



Alan: Frost wrote, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”  But what is the “you” that’s allowed past the door?



Families


We sow what is in us to sow:
          Forget-me-not, Heart’s-ease,
          Love-in-a-mist, Love-lies-bleeding.
Yanking the seeds from our guts,
we spill dusty clouds of them
over wives-kids-fathers-husbands-sisters-mothers-brothers.

Our near and dear: far and away
the stoniest soil in town.
But they have other things in mind
after checking the catalogues:
          forced Amaryllis, black Gladiolus,
          fern that lives on air, hot-house orchid.
What we offer are weeds.

Don’t you see, dear ones, don’t you see,
that we sow what is in us to sow,
that our guts are giving out
with the last, the very last, of the
Forget-me-not, Heart’s-ease, Love-in-a-mist, Love-lies-bleeding?

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