Eating a Pear
As if it is always October
sun splashing the side yard
that hazy light, so golden
when it first gets bright
like the fog of waking up,
walking like you are still
asleep, then sharpened
air hits your face, it is fall
outside, suddenly summer
almost never happened.
You can see so clearly
down the lane now, deer
are settling in the corn
leftover from the combine.
Dad has started hauling
wood in from the ravine,
always getting ready for
winter. Those pears
are glinting in the narrow
tree like yellow tear drops
almost ready to slide down
but hanging on. They taste
like a thin cold stream, or
Granny’s roses just before
frost, that wild cry of geese
lifting off Browning’s pond
over the back hill – faint
and mournful, hooting
don’t. go. don’t. go. while
aiming straight over-head
sharp as the rise of an arrow.
sun splashing the side yard
that hazy light, so golden
when it first gets bright
like the fog of waking up,
walking like you are still
asleep, then sharpened
air hits your face, it is fall
outside, suddenly summer
almost never happened.
You can see so clearly
down the lane now, deer
are settling in the corn
leftover from the combine.
Dad has started hauling
wood in from the ravine,
always getting ready for
winter. Those pears
are glinting in the narrow
tree like yellow tear drops
almost ready to slide down
but hanging on. They taste
like a thin cold stream, or
Granny’s roses just before
frost, that wild cry of geese
lifting off Browning’s pond
over the back hill – faint
and mournful, hooting
don’t. go. don’t. go. while
aiming straight over-head
sharp as the rise of an arrow.
Ellen Stone was raised in the hills of rural northeastern Pennsylvania. She taught special education for over thirty years in Kansas and Michigan public schools. Stone advises a poetry club at Community High School and co-hosts a monthly poetry series in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she raised three daughters with her husband. She is the author of What Is in the Blood (Mayapple Press, 2020) and The Solid Living World (Michigan Writers’ Cooperative Press, 2013).
Art: Untitled, Amber Tattersall