STATE LINES
Some poems are shouted from rooftops, others are whispers in the mind. August Kleinzahler’s “Peaches in November” fits the latter category as it monitors developments so local the reader feels ushered into his room or backyard. The poem is about the passage of time and how the speaker’s attention to the thudding peaches erases his awareness of it. I’m keen on poems charged with fine details such as the color of the peaches changing, and the scattering, shooting movements of the mourning doves. The poem’s final image is one of hope as winter approaches. The peach tree’s boughs, unburdened of fruit, “raise themselves up” as if in relief or praise.
Peaches in November
Peaches redden, and at day’s end glow as if from within the way bronze does, before thudding down. Mourning doves scatter at the sound, shooting away in low trajectories, and the mind starts, in spite of itself, even after weeks of hearing them drop through the night and all day long: the intervals so far off any possible grid of anticipation, and the impact each time they hit ground amid a racket of leaves just different enough from the time before, and the time before that, you are tricked out of thought, awake to the sound as the last of them come down and the boughs slowly raise themselves up.
Excerpted from “Before Dawn on Bluff Road / Hollyhocks in the Fog,” by August Kleinzahler, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux © 2017 by August Kleinzahler. All rights reserved.
August Kleinzahler is the author of 11 books of poems, including “The Strange Hours Travelers Keep” and “Sleeping It Off in Rapid City.” He lives in San Francisco.
David Roderick is the co-founder of Left Margin LIT: A Home for the Literary Arts, in Berkeley. He is author of “Blue Colonial” and “The Americans.”