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?