April 28, 2008: The Leaving, Brigit Pegeen Kelly
The Leaving
Brigit Pegeen Kelly
My father said I could not do it,
but all night I picked the peaches.
The orchard was still, the canals ran steadily.
I was a girl then, my chest its own walled garden.
How many ladders to gather an orchard?
I had only one and a long patience with lit hands
and the looking of the stars which moved right through me
the way the water moved through the canals with a voice
that seemed to speak of this moonless gathering
and those who had gathered before me.
I put the peaches in the pond’s cold water,
all night up the ladder and down, all night my hands
twisting fruit as if I were entering a thousand doors,
all night my back a straight road to the sky.
And then out of its own goodness, out
of the far fields of the stars, the morning came,
and inside me was the stillness a bell possesses
just after it has been rung, before the metal
begins to long again for the clapper’s stroke.
The light came over the orchard.
The canals were silver and then were not.
and the pond was—I could see as I laid
the last peach in the water—full of fish and eyes.
[I love this poem and am frustrated by it for the same reason: like Mary Poppins, it never explains anything. Narrative poetry is often so straightforward, I like that this one retains an air of mystery. And how all the images it brings together — stars, the peaches, fish and eyes — click so unexpectedly and perfectly.
Plus how great is that metaphor — “the stillness a bell possesses / just after it has been rung” — for how you feel after an all-nighter?]
A year ago today: Theories of Time and Space, Natasha Trethewey
Two years ago: Dream Song 145, John Berryman
Three years ago: Having It Out With Melancholy, Jane Kenyon
