the pear

.

November. One pear

sways on the tree past leaves, past reason.

In the nursing home, my friend has fallen.

Chased, he said, from the freckled woods

by angry Thoreau, Coleridge, and Beaumarchais.

Delusion too, it seems, can be well-read.

He is courteous, well-spoken even in dread.

The old fineness in him hangs on

for dear life. "My mind now?

A small ship under the wake of a large.

They force you to walk on your heels here,

the angles matter.  Four or five degrees,

and you're lost." Life is dear to him yet,

though he believes it his own fault he grieves,

his own fault his old friends have turned against him

like crows against an injured of their kind.

There is no kindness here, no flint of mercy.

Descend, descend,

some voice must urge, inside the pear-stem.

The argument goes on, he cannot outrun it.

Dawnlight to dawnlight, I look: it is still there.

~ Jane Hirshfield 

from Come, Thief

art by janis zroback