houses shrank behind additions.
I had my bearings then that day but no
directions, and I wound up out of town
at an orchard farm I’d known of as a boy
to see if they might have the lost addresses
of those who in my mind were so nearby.
The woman working the syrup and cider shop
looked up and asked me how I was. “I’m fine,”
I said. “We haven’t seen you in a while,”
she grinned, telling me her maiden name.
And then I understood the sculptors’ claim
of finding the shape within the stone, and saw
the girl I’d known twenty-five years before.
We talked a while about our lives, our jobs,
before she told me where I had to go.
But even now I can’t get past the fact
she recognized without a moment’s thought
my face unseen by her since I’d left school.
I, who traveled far afield, put streets
between us, languages and lives and years,
returned to her and to the rest, no doubt,
untouched by time. The change was theirs, it seemed,
incremental as an orchard’s growth,
but real. And I, like the unlucky dead,
would gladly move among them as their own.
Contrivance
National Arboretum
Consider these trees,
stationed on their slatted stands,
tended centuries
and trained to be small.
Root-pruned and limb-wired—such
techniques could enthrall
the quietest mind.
Appetite renders distant
the spruce one might find
clinging to a cliff
or maples burnished by wind,
positing as if
on each. As small as
they are, the feigned perspectives
offer up solace
(What could they be there?
What do we want them to be?
—Islands built on air!)
among their trunks, burled
and dwarfed and stripped of their bark,
in our full-scale world.
John Porter Produce
This is the shower
that every day settles the dust.
In less than an hour
it’s passed. Then, a crust
of mud coats everything.
Since now it’s raining,
duck inside. And though the rain won’t stop,
it turns into a mercurial drop
in a bucket. Near the grapes,
a cat naps.
On the wall, a calendar
noting the days the lunar phases appear
is open to June
of last year.
Not that time stopped then,
or slowed, it’s just that it has gone
as quietly as their game of dominoes,
which anyone might lose.
Eggs and fruit are what the days produce.
Each old man knows
the weight and cost of all
the goods by holding them in hand. Still, the one
who’s just played his turn
weighs them on the scale
for a stranger who happened in
while the fruit sat ripening.
Step outside—
the rain has quit and the mud has nearly dried.
The sun is out
and the air, unlike before, is not so dirty.
Inside the bag, the fruit
is fresh, almost bitter, and gritty.
Dressing the Pheasant
After the knife hit the craw
of the bird gone stiff and cool
with ice and time in transit,
I removed the seeds, still whole,
from below the cocked head
and fingered them like beads,
one prayer apiece, as if grain
picked from the gullet of a bird
were of greater grace than if not,
in a hunter’s boot, let’s say,
shook out and left to grow,
or before the bird was shot,
if hours had
