It’s the consistency of flesh that drives us, how a pome ascends the stairs of its origin. A boy shakes pears down off the higher branches as his friends scavenge underneath, groping for the thing necks. If you find yourself holding one, hungry, if that’s the word, then you are testament to what festers in its fattened lobe like a ball of sugar bees. Here is Augustine, his thin fingers tearing into skin that barely holds the pulp around its core. Poised nudes forever in their sunny chairs, they await whatever plucking comes. When they’re eaten with darkness plunging always further into their hearts, a few seeds ache then swell black as appetite. Or as their profile imitates a lover’s falling breasts, we take them in as we do our own bodies, as infants do, wanting anything to give our wanting form.
Poem from Consolation Miracle, reprinted with permission of Southern Illinois University Press