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- LORIN FORD
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Bitter Fruit
a
response to Grant Caldwell
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- Here come the first buds of quince again,
random swellings in the thicket of twigs
- she didn't prune midwinter. It's too late now.
- She's smoking again, outside in the cold
- with her arthritis and broken wrist.
- She's thinking of Blake and his priests in the garden,
- his invisible worm and how even now,
- under quince bark that loosens and wrinkles like skin,
- codling moth worms – sperm-like micro-dragons –
- sleep 'til blossom fall, then wake, unerring,
- to pierce the green beginnings with decay.
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- This year will she spray the tree with poison,
- try to save the fruit? Or will the season pass
- like all the other seasons when she sat and brooded
- and didn't get round to it? Bees are already there
- at the fruity sage, whose deep-throated blooms
- shout hot pink early, a jump ahead of the spring
- competition, when every flower's doing it.
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- She thinks: how the open beaks of hatchlings
- reveal a pattern that parent birds can't resist;
- how last night's new chanteuse took the prize,
- who'd sung her verses to the judges (men,
- dreaming in their fifties); how nature uses youth
- so why shouldn't youth use nature and
- if only she'd been wise to this before
- she lost the trick of the flower.
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