Our series of poetry excerpts continues with a poem by Paisley Rekdal from her new book, Nightingale, a careful, hypnotic work. The book opens with “Psalm,” a poem about a narrator’s observation of her impatient, earnest neighbor, who, despite the “ice-sheathed” branches, “waits, with her ladder and sack, for something to break.” In “Pear,” the longing for fruit returns in a meticulous poem that shows Rekdal’s vision and storytelling gifts. “It is not a sin / to eat one,” she writes, “though you may think // of a woman’s body as you do it, / the bell-shaped swell of it / rich in your hand.” By turns sensual and sweet, Rekdal’s narrator captures the many facets of hunger.
Pear
after Susan Stewart
No one ever died for a bite
of one, or came back from the dead
for a single taste: the cool flesh
cellular or stony, white
as the belly of the winter hare
or a doe’s scut, flicking,
before she mates. Even an unripe one
is delicious, its crisp bite cleaner
almost than water and its many names
just as inviting: Bartlett and Comice,
Anjou, Nashi, Concorde
and Seckel, the pomegranate-skinned
Starkrimson, even the medieval
Bosc, which looks like it dropped
from an oil painting. It is not a sin
to eat one, though you may think
of a woman’s body as you do it,
the bell-shaped swell of it
rich in your hand, and for this reason
it was sacred to Venus, Juno, all women
celebrated or dismissed
in its shape, that mealy sweetness
tunneling from its center, a gold
that sinks back into itself with age.
To ripen a pear, wrap it in paper,
lay it in cloth by an open window
or slip a rotten one beside it
on a metal dish: dying cells call always
to the fresh ones, the body’s
siren song that, having heard
it once, we can’t stop singing.
This is not the fruit
that will send you to hell
nor keep you there;
it will not give you knowledge,
childbirth, power, or love:
you won’t know more pain
for having eaten one, or choke
on a bite to fall asleep
under glass. It has no use
for archer or hero, though
anything you desire from an apple
you can do with the pear, like a dark sister
with whom you might live out
your secret desires. Cook it
in wine, mull it with spices, roast it
with honey and cloves. Time sweetens
and we taste it, so gather the fruit
weeks before ripeness,
let summer and winter both
simmer inside, for it is
a fall fruit whose name in China
means separation, though only the fearful
won’t eat one with those they love.
To grow a tree from seed,
you’ll need a garden
and a grafting quince, bees, a ladder,
shears, a jug; you’ll need water
and patience, sun and mud,
a reverence for the elders
who told no true stories
of this fruit’s origin,
wanting to give us the freedom
of one thing that’s pleasure alone.
Cool and sweet, cellular and stony,
this is the fruit I’ll never die for,
nor come back from the dead
for a single taste.
The juice of the pear
shines on my cheeks.
There is no curse in it. I’ll eat
what I like and throw the rest
to the grasses. The seeds
will find whatever soils they were meant for.
Copyright 2019 Copper Canyon Press. All rights reserved. Posted here with permission of Copper Canyon Press.
