My father said I could not do it, <br />but all night I picked the peaches. <br />The orchard was still, the canals ran steadily. <br />I was a girl then, my chest its own walled garden. <br />How many ladders to gather an orchard? <br />I had only one and a long patience with lit hands <br />and the looking of the stars which moved right through me <br />the way the water moved through the canals with a voice <br />that seemed to speak of this moonless gathering <br />and those who had gathered before me. <br />I put the peaches in the pond's cold water, <br />all night up the ladder and down, all night my hands <br />twisting fruit as if I were entering a thousand doors, <br />all night my back a straight road to the sky. <br />And then out of its own goodness, out <br />of the far fields of the stars, the morning came, <br />and inside me was the stillness a bell possesses <br />just after it has been rung, before the metal <br />begins to long again for the clapper's stroke. <br />The light came over the orchard. <br />The canals were silver and then were not. <br />and the pond was--I could see as I laid <br />the last peach in the water--full of fish and eyes.<br /><br />Brigit Pegeen Kelly<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-leaving/
