The stem is evidence, the thing that reminds you the fruit once weighed down a branch in a heavy orchard
“My father liked his fruit very ripe, so whenever one of us came across an overripe pear we gave it to him,” Natalia Ginzburg writes in The Family Lexicon. “‘Ah, so you give me your rotten pears! What real jackasses you are!’ he’d say with a hearty laugh that reverberated through the apartment, then he’d eat the pear in two bites.”
You can feel it: the almost alcoholic impression a very ripe pear leaves somewhere between your throat and your lungs, a smell more than a taste. It’s the thing that makes a pear drop a pear drop. It’s the thing that makes it feel like you breathed the pear in, that a moment ago it was a piece of fruit in a dark and golden painting, then it was gone.
Time will go by the way it did
before history, pure and unnoticed,
a mystery that arose between the sun and moon
before there was a word
for dawn or noon or midnight,
before there were names for the earth’s
uncountable things,
when fruit hung anonymously
from scattered groves of trees,
light on the smooth green side,
shadow on the other.
