Deaf-Mute in the Pear Tree

His clumsy body is a golden fruit

pendulous in the pear tree

Blunt fingers among the multitudinous buds

Adriatic blue the sky above and through

the forking twigs

Sun ruddying tree’s trunk, his trunk

his massive head thick-nobbed with burnished curls

tight-clenched in bud

(Painting by Generalíc. Primitive.)

I watch him prune with silent secateurs

Boots in the crotch of branches shift their weight

heavily as oxen in a stall

Hear small inarticulate mews from his locked mouth

a kitten in a box

Pear clippings fall

soundlessly on the ground

Spring finches sing

soundlessly in the leaves

A stone. A stone in ears and on his tongue

Through palm and fingertip he knows the tree’s

quick springtime pulse

Smells in its sap the sweet incipient pears

Pale sunlight’s choppy water glistens on

his mutely snipping blades

and flags and scraps of blue

above him make regatta of the day

But when he sees his wife’s foreshortened shape

sudden and silent in the grass below

uptilt its face to him

then air is kisses, kisses

stone dissolves

his locked throat finds a little door

and through it feathered joy

flies screaming like a jay

Source: The Glass Air: Selected Poems (Oxford University Press, 1985)