From the Archives

Pears




heat/that presses up and blunts/the points of pears

H.D.

The pear tree behind the poorhouse is so laden
with bottom-heavy volumes
that it seems spattered like a green pane,
with drops more of combustion and gravity
than pure water is -- more like candlewax, or tears,
which are also pyriform,
a fact that distracts
from what the poor eat, out of hand.

In fall, when everything seems weighted
toward the palm,
October unearths a pyre
that calls sundered pairs from the bell ark.
We, I, arrive, lowing,
to the sound of water gathering in the eaves,
preparing the stilletto, the spike
that will also, in time, fall toward the palm.

(When I could no longer see no evil,
I felt dizzy, yet oddly free.)

Yes, I am aware
that beatitude must be misunderstood,
that it hangs in the same darkness as the hand
that hesitates above the smorgasbord,
the hand that obeys the pull of the pear
and falls toward it. But nonetheless
I have found it possible to coexist
in an unexpectedly companionable manner
with the noises behind the wall,
deriving from them a strange comfort
that I am sure is reciprocal.

But what has impressed the wax
into its sensual variation of the conical ?
Even Pythagoras could not find
a hypoteneuse in that mess.
We think the same thumb that kneaded in sex,
has impressed sleeping beauty,
but how, after all, can we be sure ?
I have lost everything in the name game.
It has been time for a long time
to pare prayer. Nothing I know of, not even exegesis,
calls buds from the burned field.


9.22.96