Classic Poem

The hedge
the leaning tower
the gourd
the lamp
are all decorations
that people have left.
Are the greatest monuments humans have made.
There's nothing more to say.
When autumn comes I visit the village of Windsor.
From peasants, father and son, like those
in Victorian illustrations of Aesop's Fables ,
I bought a yellow pear,
peeled it with a shiny crescent-shaped
Sheffield knife, and ate it.
That itinerant bear-tormenting man had stopped coming.
With a child wearing a silk hat
I exchanged hips for acorns.
Women's dreams can only pass into the wind and tremble.
There's nothing more to fear.
At a riverside bookstore I bought a botanical dictionary (technicolor) showing edible
and poisonous mushrooms in Britain
and came back by horse cart.