708
Laden
What do you think did this?
The picture my sister sent was of a pear
half covered in meticulous,
linear bite marks.
When I came to visit later that week
the pear still sat on the kitchen island
— the whole scene preserved like an installation,
the leathery green shards of pear skin all around it on the counter.
It was late summer,
and we were planning her wedding.
It was set to be be in the backyard
where she lived,
a lively tangle of flowers and fruit trees.
Our father was not invited.
In the weeks before it, we siblings
gathered as often as we could,
to tend the garden together.
First I pruned the old apple tree,
later moving on to the pear.
Its branches were so laden, they were breaking
from the weight of their fruit.
He called me to talk about it once,
and once only, his voice quivering
with rage and grief and confusion.
He was utterly unable to see
his ownership in all of it;
utterly unable to simply apologize.
Sometimes, when I’m tired
of diplomacy and nothing will suffce,
I imagine myself as a rat
crawling into a kitchen window
in the dead of night,
the whole house sleeping,
and the flesh of the pear
sweet and forbidden
and perfect as the full moon
in August.
Roy Arthur Blodgett is a naturalist and writer currently living in Jerusalem Valley, within the ancestral homeland of the Lake Miwok. His work explores the intersections of natural and cultural history, power and privilege, ancestry, memory, and human responsibility in the cosmos. He has self-published two chapbooks of poetry – Usal Beach to Ferndale (2015), and Soil and Shadow (2018, with Heavy Letters Press) – and has completed a third, Five Years, which is soon forthcoming.
