One Early Summer Morning I See a Vision of My Father Eating a Pear
Image by Ashley Geiger, originally appeared in Kolaj Magazine
(Please note that due to formatting this poem is best viewed on a desktop.)
My father
(in a cabin up-north,
5 a.m. sun still arcing watered-
down white icing over navy
to prepare the sky for its arrival,
blaze-orange hunting suspender
pants no hat yet
worn olive green thermals)
sits at an aluminum and floral Formica table
(like kitchen/dining room sentinel
in our house only this beast
of early 80s nostalgia was smaller
a little older almost junkier
it must be the beginning of winter
deep into the deer season
to explain his lateness, any earlier
and he’d be in the tree-stand before
the sky’s SWAT-black went navy).
Through the window the scuff-plastic rooster's thin dial skewers 0°
(a marshmallow over frozen firepit).
Foggy tendrils of ice extend from the dark shore
(no real snows yet odd
and in my father’s hand a bruised
overripe pear— a fruit I only knew
from sliced/canned-in-water sides
served by mom with mac ‘n cheese
when I ate with the Day-Care kids
she watched and I tried to ignore).
My father holds the pear, admires it
(and he never was a fresh fruit guy
outside a grudging appreciation
for the taste of apples and bananas—
hanging fruits, I too knew
are sweeter than earthy vegetables)
and I can tell that not I, nor my mother
(the loading dock, whirring Tercel,
and least of all, deer)
pester the word fixated in his mind
(his face stoic—almost, relaxed,
an ease I'd only seen in others
the last time I’d seen him smile
without cautiously de-facing it
as if lifted cheeks and curled lips
had so far to fall to their
normal
place
that he worried they might break,
it disappeared from the tri-state
to resurface in a coastal Navy town).
How fleeting—... contenting
(ghostlike satisfying in a strange
almost almost non-selfish way)
to see him consider the oblong fruit with expectation
(holding out for that last
moment before movement)
thinking only
Pear.
About the Author
Zebulon Huset is a teacher, writer and photographer living in San Diego. His writing has recently appeared in Meridian, The Southern Review, Fence, Rosebud, Atlanta Review & Texas Review among others. He publishes the writing blog Notebooking Daily, edits the journal Coastal Shelf, and recommends literary journals at TheSubmissionWizard.com.
About the Artist
Ashley Geiger is a visual artist from Toledo, OH. Her work seeks to reanimate old photographic processes like calotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes, and daguerreotypes to create a bridge between the past and present to recover the voices of those who have been forgotten overlooked, or underrepresented in history.