With a wall and a ditch between us, I watched the gate-legged dromedary
Creak open from her sleep and come headfirst to me
As I held out three rust-mottled, tough pears, the color of camels.
When I tossed one, she made no move to catch it; whatever they eat
Lies still and can wait: the roots and sticks, the scrag-ends of brambles.

She straddled, dipping her neck; grey lips and lavender tongue,
Which can choose the best of thorns, thrust the pear to her gullet.
Choking, she mouthed it; her ruminating jaw swung up;
Her eyes lashed out. With a groan she crushed it down,
And ecstasy swept her down into the ditch, till her chin

And her pointed, prolonged face sat on the wall. She stared
At me, inventor and founder of pears. I emptied my sack.
She ate them painfully, clumsy with joy, her withers trembling,
Careless of dust on the bitten and dropped halves, ignoring flies,
Losing herself in the pit of her last stomach.

When she gazed at me again, our mouths were both deserted.
I walked away with myself. She watched me disappear,
Then with a rippling trudge went back to her stable
To snort, to browse on hay, to remember my sack forever.
She's been used to having no pears, but hadn't known it.

Imagine the hostile runners, the biters of burnooses,
Coughers and spitters, whose legs can kick at amazing angles—
Their single humps would carry us willingly over dunes
Through sandstorms and the swirling jinni to the edges of oases
If they, from their waterless, intractable hearts, might stretch for pears.