Peach Tree - Franz Wright

[Larry Robinson]

Peach Tree

Winds are blessing one by one the unlighted buds of the backbent peach tree’s unnoted return. At first light, gray, I stand beside the tree my height: such fragile limbs, as of bark-covered glass—how did we ever survive, find our way back and take again our alien stand here, reappearing at the tip of one of endless branching roads, a dead-end finally? Home. One of quiet’s addresses. Where I would endure gratefully five more years, lying low; survive until I couldn’t. I had often wondered where it would find me. So, one more northern spring has been given me, too, frail peach tree. You look good. You look like you could go on doing that forever. I have no more idea what I look like than you do, I’m happy to say; all of that is over, that business with the mirror. One winter afternoon I noticed it had stopped. I couldn’t anymore, and that was all, wish I’d thought of it sooner. Trembling with the effort not to break, between thumb and forefinger, this one hidden branch I identify with and am trying to lift and lower my eye to. Leaves receding as I reach out, some force in me pushing them away, maybe; I hope that isn’t so. Because I want to touch, polishing frictionlessly, the rows of velvet greenest dark beginnings, infolded, growths destined to develop into nothing more than stunted fruit stripped from their boughs overnight by black birds. I wish I could go inside one of them, past the tough rind into one of identical pink erect closed eyelidcolored buds, curl up the size of a comma, and wait there for the softly sifting wind to find me, lift me; wait there alone with everyone else in the darkness before we were born. How did we ever drift into this chill state? I’m feeling kind of bent in half myself; and I see us both bound for the fire, lone peach tree, then nothing, then pure spirit again, even Lazarus has to die—what have I done, what have I been so afraid of all my life?

	- Franz Wright