By Their Fruits

Three Poems

On Needing Things in Verse 

As if the blackbird had had to caw it, 
a beer’s as good as anything now. 
Morning, he says, and the others follow. 

They weren’t there, a minute ago. 
It was just you. A beer’ll do. 
It used to do better. 

But I didn’t know then what I know now. 
Grammar made me think I did, 
and I drank to use it well. 

That song wasn’t there, an hour ago. 
The day’s lighting itself up, 
the gradualist, the swallower, 

suffering language to be new, 
or at least to give new names 
to some old ways of feeling 

carrots cut their teeth, 
skies like blueberry skin, 
piss like Special K. 

The birds weren’t there a year ago. 
Fuck them! Neither was I. 
Sweet things! All of a 

cadence, all day long. 
But I lost it all for a decade, 
their redwing, cattail song, 

the rooster down the street, 
out of joint with dawn, 
and Bear, 

that dog with one blue eye, 
licking the loss of his leg 
and howling at us still. 

Still, if the ear can say 
what it knows, 
and the tongue wear down a pill, 

no beer can beat this band 
of blackbirds joined by crows, 
where nothing plainly has its way 

or sings how anything goes, 
or sings how anything goes.


Still Life 

The plums get heavy 
in themselves. 
They weigh the table down. 
Bananas grow like leopards 
and formica disappears. 
The last peach gets antsy 
at its bruise. Spores form 
in teal. The summer-blue stems 
whose tags are on them still 
catch dust in their bulbs. 
The gas station bonus glass 
touches the loving cup 
and the recipes 
cut from the news.
The pantry has two cans.
This is the life.


Fruit Country

Certain fruits, like bananas and crabapples, 
record everything that happens to them, 
and this is called “getting ripe.”
But I am too late or too soon, 
and this banana I take a knife to 
when I can’t talk in time, 
takes in what I give off 
and gives it out again. 

Experts say bananas are best black, 
become fruit then when their starch 
has been converted into sugar, 
and we want to throw them out. 

At Fruit Country, only one man, 
a retired pilot, asked us to save him 
black bananas. He seemed always on the point 
of bleeding dry right through his pores. 
His watch slid down to his elbow 
when he’d hold a bunch up to the light. 

A picture of perfect health is rare, 
in spite of all the scenarios there are 
for becoming one, the clubs and spas 
that promise the body of an excellent 
white wine, a buttery nose, a clean finish. 
But who’s to say this brown and spreading blotch 
I pressure the crabapple into making, 
this nick’s assimilation in the pear, 
isn't a blow struck for beauty? 

The peach sweetens in its bruises. 
Ripeness owns its uses.