Fruit in Rain
September 1, 2010
Down from the mountains pears and apples
like Christmas decor, yellow and red,
bells and balls, illuminate the market. Buy eight or six,
weighed by women’s hands; silently they lift
their offerings toward you, from flattened cardboard trays.
Such fruit tastes like mist and rain
chilled by winds higher than the sky, and dripping.
Inside the market melons curve like bellies, grapes trucked
south from flatlands; not purple but smeared red and dark,
blue as watery wine. Bananas, dwarf hands fat of finger,
sweet like sucking sugar, upended catcher’s mitts thrown
down when the game ends, yellow on the field of green.
This September was birthed by wrinkled women
past the fruiting season. It rained and rained:
trees loaded their branches, corn died in swollen mud-rows,
in my patio a row of geraniums, pink and red, decayed.
2010 - 2019
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