Joe Hackett
Birthday Morning in an Orchard
Raw March air numbs the gardener’s hand on
the cold stainless steel of his pruning shears.
To keep warm he stays in constant motion,
cutting away not just branches, but years.
He’s perched on a ladder in boots licked clean
by wet grass. Above him, the mildewed green
of an apple tree. Any sprigs which cross
he’ll prune, and take wood touched by canker’s kiss.
He listens to the shears’ insistent snips,
like seconds ticking. Twigs fall when he clips
to pristine buds for a new beginning
on this, his recurrent birthday morning.
Minutes, hours, days, months are reversed in time
until he gets back where he started from.
Down the valley fog blurs distant hilltops
into whales beached by a soupy ocean.
Somewhere curlews call. The gardener stops,
recalling former birthdays one by one
like rows planted in hope, winters ago.
Their buds star the sky, and are set to grow
into James Grieve, Egremont, red Winston,
Early Transparent Gage, Farleigh Damson,
buds soft as the down on a young girl’s lip.
He dreams, with time stilled, then begins to snip
again, to draw power up from his roots,
prune hard to invest in his strongest shoots.
Cuttings can be burned later, dried by Spring
breezes. Meanwhile all his leaves, blossoms, fruit,
all his trees bowed down by an autumn glut,
are future things. All his imagining.
Page(s) 61
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