Classic Poem

In an old orchard, which the wasps and flickers
alone husband,
under aging trees —
their gentle lanes of gnarled and worm-eaten silence
paved with rank, rotting rubies and
ants milling cider in the sticky grass —

here's fruit most sweet, most stolen, where the ruin
of a fiftieth fall
dapples with leaves,
sun, shards, shadows some famished household,
long ladderless, still pitifully gathering all
windfalls onto its damp lap of graves.











Used by permission of author.