someday-saplings

Foulmouth, remember the
trip of tongue, the stale
taste

Not paired, or barely brusque,
bands of dark stone stumble
bads of brusque pears and peach pits
(bads: pl. groups of grotesqueries, holding not much appeal beyond the morbid)

With a thin knife, the slip-slit
with a snicker snack the apple, cored for consumption,
deprived of seed,
Reduced to fruit, food, from the pulpy womb of
someday-saplings

crisp, like the taste of autumn, and
like autumn, folded in faint must, is it strange
that while spring smells at first of rot and winter
stabs the nostrils with the blank tang of steel and
there is, about autumn, only the musk of age, as if
grandfather had empty his pipe all across the
summer and mothballed it to scent it (like he used
to do for our cedar linen chest) and winter
only came when Anya, the cleaning lady, lifted the
cushioned lid and emptying it sprayed febreze and
mint and bleached each
and
every
sheet blank