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Come here’s a peach he said and held it out just far enough to reach beyond his lap and off- ered me a room the one room left he said in all of Thessaloniki that night packed with traders The peach was lush I hadn’t slept for days it was like velvet lips a lamp he smiled patted the bed for me I knew it was in fact the only room the only bed The peach trembled and he said Come nodding to make me agree I wanted the peach and the bed he said to take it see how nice it was and I thought how I could take it ginger- ly my finger- tips only touch- ing only it Not in or out I stayed in the doorway watching a fly He stroked the peach and asked where I was from I said the States he smiled and asked how long I’d stay The fly had found the peach I said I’d leave for Turkey in the morning I wanted so much to sleep and on a bed I thought of all the ways to say that word and that they must have gradient meanings He asked me did I want the peach and I said sure and took it from his hand He asked then if I’d take the room It costs too much I said and turned to go He said to stay a while and we could talk The sun was going down I said no thanks I’d head out on the late train but could I still have the peach and what else could he say to that but yes

I’m thinking it’s time to go back to the peach farm or rather the peach farm seems to be wanting me back even though the work of picking, sorting, the sticky perils and sudden swarms are done. Okay, full disclosure, I’ve never been on a peach farm, just glimpsed from a car squat trees I assumed were peach and knew a couple in school who went off one summer, so they said, to work on a peach farm. She was pregnant, he didn’t have much intention, canvases of crushed lightbulbs and screws in paste. He’d gotten fired from the lunch counter for putting too much meat on the sandwiches of his friends then ended up in Macy’s in New York selling caviar and she went home I think to Scranton, two more versions of never hearing from someone again. I’d like to say the most important fruits are within but that’s the very sort of bullshit one goes to the peach farm to avoid, not just flight from quadratic equations, waiting for the plumber, finding out your insurance won’t pay. Everyone wants out of the spider’s stomach. Everyone wants to be part of some harvest and stop coughing to death and cursing at nothing and waking up nowhere near an orchard. Look at these baskets, bashed about, nearly ruined with good employ. Often, after you’ve spent a day on a ladder, you dream of angels, the one with the trumpet and free subscriptions to the New Yorker or the archer, the oink angel, angel of ten dollar bills found in the dryer or the one who welcomes you in work gloves and says if you’re caught eating a single peach, even windfall, you’ll be executed. Then laughs. It’s okay, kiddo, long as you’re here, you’re one of us.

Out in the orchards the dogs stood Almost frozen in the bleak spring night & Mister dragged out into the rows Between his peach trees the old dry limbs Building at regular intervals careful pyres While the teeth of the dogs chattered & snapped & the ice began to hang long as whiskers From the globes along the branches & at his signal we set the piles of branches ablaze Tending each carefully so as not to scorch The trees as we steadily fed those flames Just enough to send a rippling glow along Those acres of orchard where that body— Sister Winter—had been held so wisely to the fire

Nothing to tell why I cannot write in re Nobody; nobody to narrate this latter acknowledgement: the self that counts words to a line, accountable survivor pain-wedged, pinioned in the cleft trunk, less petty than a sprite, poisonous as Ariel to Prospero's own knowledge. In my room a vase of peacock feathers. I will attempt to describe them, as if for evidence on which a life depends. Except for the eyes they are threadbare, the threads hanging as from a luminate tough weed in February. But those eyes—like a Greek letter, omega, fossiled in an Indian shawl; like a shaved cross section of living tissue, the edge metallic blue, the core of jet, the white of the eye in fact closer to beige, the whole encircled with a black-fringed green. The peacock roosts alone on a Scots pine at the garden end, in blustery twilight his lambent cloak stark as a warlock's cape, the maharajah-bird that scavenges close by the stone-troughed, stone-terraced, stone-ensurfed Suffolk shoreline; at times displays his scream.

He approaches her, trailing his whole fortune, Perfectly cocksure, and suddenly spreads The huge fan of his tail for her amazement. Each turquoise and purple, black-horned, walleyed quill Comes quivering forward, an amphitheatric shell For his most fortunate audience: her alone. He plumes himself. He shakes his brassily gold Wings and rump in a dance, lifting his claws Stiff-legged under the great bulge of his breast. And she strolls calmly away, pecking and pausing, Not watching him, astonished to discover All these seeds spread just for her in the dirt.

I am always hungry & wanting to have sex. This is a fact. If you get right down to it the new unprocessed peanut butter is no damn good & you should buy it in a jar as always in the largest supermarket you know. And I am an enemy of change, as you know. All the things I embrace as new are in fact old things, re-released: swimming, the sensation of being dirty in body and mind summer as a time to do nothing and make no money. Prayer as a last re- sort. Pleasure as a means, and then a means again with no ends in sight. I am absolutely in opposition to all kinds of goals. I have no desire to know where this, anything is getting me. When the water boils I get a cup of tea. Accidentally I read all the works of Proust. It was summer I was there so was he. I write because I would like to be used for years after my death. Not only my body will be compost but the thoughts I left during my life. During my life I was a woman with hazel eyes. Out the window is a crooked silo. Parts of your body I think of as stripes which I have learned to love along. We swim naked in ponds & I write be- hind your back. My thoughts about you are not exactly forbidden, but exalted because they are useless, not intended to get you because I have you & you love me. It’s more like a playground where I play with my reflection of you until you come back and into the real you I get to sink my teeth. With you I know how to relax. & so I work behind your back. Which is lovely. Nature is out of control you tell me & that’s what’s so good about it. I’m immoderately in love with you, knocked out by all your new white hair why shouldn’t something I have always known be the very best there is. I love you from my childhood, starting back there when one day was just like the rest, random growth and breezes, constant love, a sand- wich in the middle of day, a tiny step in the vastly conventional path of the Sun. I squint. I wink. I take the ride.

A peanut sat on a railroad track, His heart was all a-flutter. The five-fifteen came rushing by-- Toot toot!   Peanut butter!

Believing each simple thing passes from a perception that is less clear into one that is, eventually, more clear. Believing each simple thing contains within it a minimal unity beyond which whatever else can be exists. That the two seeds, or four seeds, are where the pear will go and where it began. Black bark, blossoms in the mild rain, smelling like piss in the spring rain, the chips and twigs raining down beneath our weight as we broke off bouquets for the teacher. “What is that smell?” she asked. Stark, white, delicate, attached with green cuffs, twig to twig, the blooms bursting through the runnels that held them. Five runnels made in the foil by five fingers. The given world is infinite and reality is complete . That’s what I had written in the morning on the blackboard. And then, going home, I was stalled again on the bridge. I looked up and out and there I saw the girl flying and falling, flying and falling in the distance, in the narrow air between two buildings, her arms outspread, over and over against the strip of sky and above the gravel, or grass or ground—the light changed and I couldn’t see at all where or how she had dragged the trampoline that must have been the yielding source of all her motion. If you find a sight like this a kind of gift or sign, you’ve missed the way the mind seals over, the way the simplest thing pulls on its heavy hood and turns away slowly from a thought. For later, weeks later, I was stalled again in mid-bridge and couldn’t remember, yet could vaguely remember, the sense that something was about to happen, that the light would change like a bell or alarm and that in turn would mean the time had come when everyone must leave the school— with every sweater and pencil left in place —to burn, and burn and burn back to the ground.

There hangs this bellied pear, let no rake doubt, Meat for the tongue and febrile to the skin, Wasting for the mildew and the rot, A tallow rump slow rounded, a pelt thin And for the quickest bite; so, orchard bred, Heaviest downward from the shaking stem. Whose fingers curve around the ripened head Lust to split so fine a diadem. There is the picker, stretches for the knife, There are the ravening who claw the fruit, More, those adjuring wax that lasts a life, And foxes, freak for cunning, after loot. For that sweet suck the hornet whines his wits, But husbandman will dry her for the pits. December 1951

November. One pear sways on the tree past leaves, past reason. In the nursing home, my friend has fallen. Chased, he said, from the freckled woods by angry Thoreau, Coleridge, and Beaumarchais. Delusion too, it seems, can be well read. He is courteous, well-spoken even in dread. The old fineness in him hangs on for dear life. “My mind now? A small ship under the wake of a large. They force you to walk on your heels here, the angles matter. Four or five degrees, and you’re lost.” Life is dear to him yet, though he believes it his own fault he grieves, his own fault his old friends have turned against him like crows against an injured of their kind. There is no kindness here, no flint of mercy. Descend, descend, some voice must urge, inside the pear stem. The argument goes on, he cannot outrun it. Dawnlight to dawnlight, I look: it is still there.