Creases in Fruit
by Janet Buck

"From your phone, I can very well hear:
Herds of longing galloping away to the mountains."
                                                        -Elisha Porat

When I write about what we know,
it always concerns two doddering hags
feeling their scared way down a long wall
of loosened stone -- inch by sacred inch.
A taffy pull of will and pain
defines each measured step.
I guess we've always talked this way --
in a fever only the dying would trace.
The only yacht we've ever sailed
is on a page of someone else's paperback.
Walking the loss was our bridge.

Some years we drank ourselves to sleep
when darkness drove us there and left.
Our faces of creased fruit, close to
the leathery rind, a canvas tired
of sorrow always visiting, leaving a messy
room we still intend to clean.
Our mothers were an absent gift.
Either a package of nothing or hate.
Something to crush or shred.
Wisdom was always the whisper of grief.
Just listening was somehow church.