Too small to lift a pitchfork full
from below, I would climb up top and catch each throw,
midair, then guide and drop the load in one motion
until the wagon would hold no more.
            Then coming out of the dust from the back four acres,
I’d be atop the hay, barely able to breathe in the heat,
yet lying back in the wet of my own sweat, almost complete.
             And when we passed beneath the big pear tree
there in the middle of my grandfather’s pasture,
I knew how it would be:
I would stick out my hand and
take the pear straight out of the air
without effort; it would come to me
because it belonged to me.
            I hadn’t yet guessed how things could go wrong,
or how it might be to be left alone, or that one
could lose badly and go down at the end
like my mother, shaking and defeated.
             I was, in that moment, simply there
watching my cousins and uncles in the distance, shimmering
in the hot air like mirages in black rubber boots
with pitchforks in hand,
             and when I took my first dusty bite,
             it was like my first
sinking deep into a woman’s body,
almost overwhelming, and I could feel
             the pear’s juice sinking into me
as I lay there in the hay-scented air, adrift
and becoming everything around me,
             until suddenly I laughed out loud
             without knowing
what the laughter was about
as it poured out of me
at the top of the tree-high stack
while the future waited,
and I was carried on the harvest to the barn.