September, 1999
I was thinking about pears—or you were—I
don't remember who first started to think,
though you said Seckle pears and I said Bartlett
and nothing I could do could budge you; I
could cut the skin so quickly and keep it so thin
the light goes through it, and I held it to the light
to catch the rose, and I knew when the core was
already brown and it was spreading just by
touching the flesh, and sometimes the neck was gone,
as far as eating, though you would call it the nose,
you with your Seckles, you with your freckles, and no one
but me has quite such pleasure extruding the stem,
and no one I know puts a pear in his coat pocket
when he goes out in the rain, as I do, though what
was the pleasure eating in sheets of water compared to
the loneliness eating by yourself, and even though
hornets were in your bowl and ten or twenty
were crawling over a rotten peach and three or
four were already after my pear since it was
autumn again and hornets were dying and they were
angry, and drunk, I just wiped them away.
