Deaf-Mute in the Pear Tree

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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

© P. K. Page