The red room

Do I only think
I lost a river, culture, speech, sense of first space
and the right place?
Now, Where do you come from?
strangers ask.
Originally?
And I hesitate.
--Carol Ann Duffy.

The heaviness of pears
under the late summer sun
is not a matter of weight.

The heaving amplification of space
under fateless stars,
is not a solution to lizard-time.

The heaviness of pears
is not like the mark of time on our hands,
unbeknown to the eye's downward gaze.

It is not Spring, or Autumn,
Nor is it like
the drowning of a bee in yellow dust.

This sigh for the fall,
the desire for tender hands.
The revelation of flesh,
the longing to be devoured.

All this is a kind of darkness
for pears under late summer suns.