Little father poem

No easy thing to bear, the weight of sweetness.

Song, wisdom, sadness. Joy: sweetness equals three of any of these gravities.

See a peach bend the branch and strain the stem until it snaps. Hold the peach, try the weight, sweetness and death so round and snug in your palm. And, so, there is The weight of memory:

Windblown, a rain-soaked bough shakes, showering the man and the boy. They shiver in delight, and the father lifts from his son’s cheek one green leaf fallen like a kiss.

The good boy hugs a bag of peaches his father has entrusted to him. Now he follows his father, who carries a bagful in each arm. See the look on the boy’s face as his father moves faster and farther ahead, while his own steps flag, and his arms grow weak, as he labors under the weight of peaches.

2. Early in the Morning

While the long grain is softening

in the water, gurgling

over a low stove flame, before

the salted Winter Vegetable is sliced

for breakfast, before the birds,

my mother glides an ivory comb

through her hair, heavy

and black as calligrapher’s ink.

She sits at the foot of the bed.

My father watches, listens for

the music of comb

against hair.

My mother combs,

pulls her hair back

tight, rolls it

around two fingers, pins it

in a bun to the back of her head.

For half a hundred years she has done this.

My father likes to see it like this.

He says it is kempt.

But I know

it is because of the way

my mother’s hair falls

when he pulls the pins out.

Easily, like the curtains

when they untie them in the evening.

18. Falling: The Code

1.

Through the night

the apples

outside my window

one by one let go

their branches and

drop to the lawn.

I can’t see, but hear

the stem-snap, the plummet

through leaves, then

the final thump against the ground.

Sometimes two

at once, or one

right after another.

During long moments of silence

I wait

and wonder about the bruised bodies,

the terror of diving through air, and

think I’ll go tomorrow

to find the newly fallen, but they

all look alike lying there

dewsoaked, disappearing before me.

2.

I lie beneath my window listening

to the sound of apples dropping in

the yard, a syncopated code I long to know,

which continues even as I sleep, and dream I know

the meaning of what I hear, each dull

thud of unseen apple-

body, the earth

falling to earth

once and forever, over

and over.

3. Eating Alone

I've pulled the last of the year's young onions. The garden is bare now. The ground is cold, brown and old. What is left of the day flames in the maples at the corner of my eye. I turn, a cardinal vanishes. By the cellar door, I wash the onions, then drink from the icy metal spigot. Once, years back, I walked beside my father among the windfall pears. I can't recall our words. We may have strolled in silence. But I still see him bend that way-left hand braced on knee, creaky-to lift and hold to my eye a rotten pear. In it, a hornet spun crazily, glazed in slow, glistening juice. It was my father I saw this morning waving to me from the trees. I almost called to him, until I came close enough to see the shovel, leaning where I had left it, in the flickering, deep green shade. White rice steaming, almost done. Sweet green peas fried in onions. Shrimp braised in sesame oil and garlic. And my own loneliness. What more could I, a young man, want.