We met over 40 years ago. Floating buttocky halves
spooned into pastel fruit bowls, even drowned in
Del Monte syrup, love at first taste. Your flesh
a luminous hue, hovering on the border of cream
and August skies; your flavor pure as dreamed pleasure
grazing my waking tongue, a melting sweetness
streaming down my throat; your name, a single syllable
promising delight: pear, barely sound, mere parting of lips,
and hint of breath, apple-green p, the sweetest
diphthong ea, all the air in the world, closed in rounded rr‘d
finality. A perfect word, reducing your rumpled, pinnacled
self, to one gorgeous, Old English syllable: per.
Right now, six of you sit ripening on my windowsill.
A sky-blue towel shields bottoms against further bruising
from the wood even at birth you instinctively flee, hanging
off trees in swelling green-gold tears, yearning for earth,
or growing to maturity in bottled, olive-green light, your dying
breath suffusing aging liqueurs like the oldest I ever drank,
the summer I was 19, a century-old brandy served in snifters
the likes of which this working-class boy had never seen.
I tilted the giant crystal bowl; the fragrant liquid elongated
in mimicry of its remembered self and seeped into my mouth: a pear’s
ghost enveloped in flame lay down to rest on my tongue. We both
were saved, at least for that night. Pear. Look of women I love
but don’t lust after, I want to conjugate you: I pear, you pear,
we pear. Like raspberries, Mozart and love, for me, sufficient proof
of God’s existence. I trust you. Lead me by the tongue to heaven.
