Deaf-Mute in the Pear Tree

His clumsy body is a golden fruit pendulous in the pear tree Blunt fingers among the multitudinous buds Adriatic blue the sky above and through the forking twigs Sun ruddying tree’s trunk, his trunk his massive head thick-nobbed with burnished curls tight-clenched in bud (Painting by Generalíc. Primitive.) I watch him prune with silent secateurs Boots in the crotch of branches shift their weight heavily as oxen in a stall Hear small inarticulate mews from his locked mouth a kitten in a box Pear clippings fall soundlessly on the ground Spring finches sing soundlessly in the leaves A stone. A stone in ears and on his tongue Through palm and fingertip he knows the tree’s quick springtime pulse Smells in its sap the sweet incipient pears Pale sunlight’s choppy water glistens on his mutely snipping blades and flags and scraps of blue above him make regatta of the day But when he sees his wife’s foreshortened shape sudden and silent in the grass below uptilt its face to him then air is kisses, kisses stone dissolves his locked throat finds a little door and through it feathered joy flies screaming like a jay