For many years, Rosemerry has had a poem-a-day practice. No surprise—she has a rapidly growing produce section in her writings! Here is a selection of fruit poems that follow the season—from blossom to harvest.

And then the Fruit Comes


Every day, more blossoms.
I know it will not last.
But all week, the peach trees

do what peach trees do—
mature from green tip to first
pink to pink bud to bloom

and bloom and bloom.
It doesn’t last. But oh!
While it does, this urge

to be in it, to breathe it,
to be in blossom, too—
divide me into ten thousand

thousand petals of fluttersome
pink. Though I know
it will mean ten thousand

thousand times, all at once,
I’ll practice letting go.

**

But Do We Learn the Lesson?


In the orchard rows,
the cherries grow
until sometimes
the branches,
hung with so much ripeness,
snap. It happens,
it happens at last,
sometimes when everything
is at its deep sweetest.
It happens.

**

The apricots are gone, are gone


And the summer carries on.
In other rows, peaches grow red-cheeked
and sweetness gathers in the pears.

Surrounded by pleasure, sometimes
we still choose to mourn what isn’t there.

**
 

Wishful


After eating the peach
            all I wanted was another
                        and another and another

and a woman could go
            wandering from produce aisle
                        to farm stand to orchard row

and never find another peach
            so full of O, so full of sweetened
                        gravity, a black hole where

peach used to be—the tongue
            now more particular, now craving
                        what was once, now rummaging

trunks of time for the thrill
            that riffed beneath the fuzz, the
                        spilling golden juice, the mmm

of what cannot be labeled,
            reproduced or named,
                        the bliss of knowing that

the Big Bang banged and served up
            such a peach that curved
                        not only space but through

a woman’s sigh. Through pit where sun
            has never shone, this peach
                        has grown, has grown into hunger

that never might be met, but I will
            taste relentlessly, peach & peach, until
                        I find again the sweet-winged trill of

joy-song flesh that makes the lips
            say O and O again, and O
                        for the pleasure of perhaps an O

let us eat another and another
            and another, and if we find
                        another such one

such luck! such chance!
            let’s eat it quick and set out again
                        in search of more summer rapture.

**

 
For Pleasure


Piglet: How do you spell love?
Pooh: You don't spell it, you feel it.
—A.A. Milne


The more we know about peaches
the more we know we know nothing.
There is the science of it, so much

to learn about rootstocks and vigor
and nutrient sprays—how much
calcium, how much boron or zinc

and how much to water and when.
And the plusses of pruning them
into a V shape versus a four-limbed

open vase. And the best way to
discourage crown borers (as it turns out,
with pheromones so moths can’t mate).

Which varieties are sweetest, which
cling to the pit—it is all in the when
and the what of it. But more and more

I see how the how is a mystery.
There’s the alchemy of cell division,
the luck of escaping the frost.

But the how of it, how did the peach
evolve into globes of golden juice?
We write theories of efficiency, theories

of survival, theories of endurance
but what does it amount to, really,
when there is the luscious reality of peach,

and this is how, on the edge of
autumn, we might remember
not how, but why we breathe.

**

Haven


All night
the peaches
all night
my hands
all night
amber juice
and the scent
of summer
the flesh
of summer
this changing
tangle of low
angled light
and the sugar
that comes
with waiting.

**

 
Though It Took Me Three Hours


The pears refused to be tedious.
            Thirty-eight pounds of tree ripened fruit,
                        clear juice runnelling through long sticky fingers,
            and O such a blaze of rose blush on the yellowing skin.
One after another, I spoke to the pears
            as I quartered them, seeded them,
                        and carved out their stems. “You are beautiful,”
            I said to each one. And the pears were long walks
on April afternoons. They were full moon fleshed
            and coyote song. They were slender canoes.
                        A mythology of want. Candle wicks
            innumerable coal trains, and summer coming to an end.
They were pears. And the whole house
            simmered with the white scent of Bartlett,
                        not a rehearsal but the real perfume of it,
            anointing the rooms with autumnal grace.
How every breath is now laced with their loveliness.
            O summer gone. O sweetness in its place.

**

 
Feeding the Hungry

“In our eagerness for conceptual meanings, we ignore the actual beast.”
            --James Hillman, “Dream Animals”


It was no metaphor I bit into tonight
            but the real apple, sweet white flesh, crisp,
a thin red and green skinned gala picked from the tree
            in the center of the garden surrounded by snakes,
not metaphorical snakes, but the real ones, reticulated skin,
            long forked tongues a-flicker, all glisten and slither and hiss.
And it is no metaphorical night tonight, but the real one, dim,
            with half of a milksome moon mounting the real horizon.
And the loneliness, that is real, too, though I cannot point to it,
            touch it, nor bite it. Nor can it bite me. Nor does the darkness
dislocate its jaw to swallow me whole.
            Nor does the moon illumine my mind.
But the apple does make it a sweeter solitude
            as I think of you, the real you,
and all the skins we’ve shed, discarded, how many times
            we’ve launched anew, and how I wish
your very real skin were here by my skin in this very real dim,
            your hand reaching for what’s left of the core.

 

photo by Darby Ullyatt

For more information about Rosemerry and her work with poetry,
visit wordwoman.com.