Vespers ["Once I believed in you..."]

Once I believed in you; I planted a fig tree.

Here, in Vermont, country

of no summer. It was a test: if the tree lived,

it would mean you existed.

By this logic, you do not exist. Or you exist

exclusively in warmer climates,

in fervent Sicily and Mexico and California,

where are grown the unimaginable

apricot and fragile peach. Perhaps

they see your face in Sicily; here we barely see

the hem of your garment. I have to discipline myself

to share with John and Noah the tomato crop.

If there is justice in some other world, those

like myself, whom nature forces

into lives of abstinence, should get

the lion's share of all things, all

objects of hunger, greed being

praise of you. And no one praises

more intensely than I, with more

painfully checked desire, or more deserves

to sit at your right hand, if it exists, partaking

of the perishable, the immortal fig,

which does not travel.

Source: The Wild Iris (The Ecco Press, 1992)