One green sphere hanging from a maple branch
sends the point home: one curled crispy leaf
blowing by across the gravel. The starlings’ heads
have had their shine baked to a mellow
lilac-grey. Summer runs full bore toward its end.
We chased a colander full of ripe apricots
all the way here but they’re turning brown,
letting go a sickly syrup, are aging headlong past eating.
They sit in the fridge. No one wants them now.
We’re in wine country, a fertile womb
in a desert. We drive from vineyard to vineyard,
tasting and hoarding every small fruition.
We forget the winepress, the peach pit, the seed
we suck for all its sweetness and throw back into the earth.
Next year we’ll come looking for it, the fruit
swelling into damp globes in the leaves’ shade.
Don’t remind us of the in-between time, the burial,
the silence, the eventual groping up through black mud
toward thaw. We want a dip in the warm lake
this afternoon. We want ripe fruit in the full shade.
We want tanned limbs and colour and sugar and wine.