The Orchard

I had already decided that a thing could not be seen 

For the thing it was, when I looked up & waved my father over.

Beside our orchard of Late Elberta peaches 

A picker had hanged himself,

The man was still swaying a little by his necktie.

There was the sound of the tree limb creaking from the weight 

It held, & of the bees clustering like a moving gold over

The plain white box of their hive.

And what I noticed then wasn’t the man, but the quiet 

Tie with its twisting pattern of polka dots,

Dark brown on a field of white, & how the tie itself had not 

Been long enough & so was knotted in a half hitch

To a piece of rope he’d looped over the tree limb before

Sliding the silk of the tie against his neck

Until it was taut. The rope, I remember, had the complexion 

Of dust after a rain, & the shadows underneath 

The trees kept changing without my actually seeing them 

Change; from one moment to another I couldn’t

See them change even if I had watched for that, & only for that.

The act the man had undertaken was ancient, the rope 

Ascended to a future without him in it,

And I suppose the necktie was the quiet he wore in going back,

Back & forth between the two, the past & the future.

It was an old orchard of Late Elberta peaches that held a wild taste 

That is by now entirely lost, a flavor that once untethered 

Everything from what it was—the humming of bees, the dust 

Spiraling in shafts of light, the callouses we studied at school,

The faint twang in our English like wind in fence wire, like fate­­—

I could feel it all come back & turn into light for a moment 

When I bit into one, years later, the taste

Of its flesh turning everything except the man who had swayed 

In front of me there, into a light

So weightless & so quickly ascending that

For a moment, but only for a moment, I knew what it meant,

Knew what the body meant by swaying there—

No matter what the man who’d tried to make an example of it meant—

I knew what the body meant as my eyes lifted above it. 

It meant what was soaring above us, into the limbs of the tree,

                                     & beyond.