Autmnal Diagram

*

He liked it okay.


It was the biggest pear he'd ever seen,
and it had grown right on his very own
pear tree, the one he looked down on
from his bedroom window.

*

He had his son take a photograph
of him standing in front of the pear.
This way his sister and his mother would
have no choice but to admit it:
he had grown the world's largest pear!


*

What else could be his now? Now that he
was in possession of the most wonderful
and stupendous fruit in all of creation?
Why, he could be Mayor! He could be
Czar! All of the dark-coated petty tyrants
that had kept him under their bureaucratic
thumbs would be looking for work soon!


He could hardly contain his pride
and his confidence. The sun itself
would shine down upon him from this
moment on with a special warmth and
brightness: just enough to fill him with
a wonderful warmth, but not so much
that he would have to remove
his hat.



*

All was well with the world!


*


He tucked himself into bed late in the evening.
For hours he stood at his bedroom window
and watched the beautiful pear fairly glowing
in the light from the harvest moon.

It filled the pit of his gut with a wonderful,
gooey warmth, just to be witness to such
an event.


*

The Pear of The World!

*


It was only with tender regret that he forced himself
into bed, into the cool white sheets and the curious
buzzing in his blood when he could no longer gaze
upon his gigantic fruit.


*

He tossed and turned in the night.


He dreamed of enormous wasps, gorging on his
tender-skinned pear. He could hear their terrible
jaws working on the sweet flesh.

Their pitiless eyes black as swamp water!
They would devour it all before dawn!
His tender dreams for the future,
in peril!

He moaned and swatted at imagined foes
with his pale, sweaty hands.


*


He awoke to a pale sun in his eyes. Hot
and bothered, he washed his face in the basin
with cold well water his wife had brought in
an hour earlier.

He could hardly bear his fear. He stood
by his bed in his damp nightshirt, trembling.
Daylight streamed in from the window,
throwing a hot and slanted square of light
onto the wooden floor and filling the glass
with glare.

What would he find, should he muster the courage
to go to the window and look down?


*


His glorious future, his own sweet pear...







*