by Joan Alice Wood Kimball, from the chapbook Refuge:

A Windy World

A windy world of pond and grass
invites me to walk down the driveway.
But I’ll stop and sit a minute along the shady line
of flat-stretched fruit trees that edge the drive.

Planted two-feet apart, trained on a slant, the trees
are lashed, cordon oblique, to posts
that carry horizontal wires that extend along the
fence to hold this year’s growing shoots.

Sit in the fence’s shade with me and listen to the
wind that makes the distant maples and oaks
sough loudly like peas shooshing side to side, rolling
down a tin chute. The breeze makes the slender
branches next to me

seesaw up and down under
the weight of their tip ends,
weight from the fat, young apples of June
that look like babies with pinched cheeks and a hint
of blush on their bottoms.

Beyond my shelter, toward the setting sun, other
fruit trees–– pears, peaches––are offering their
pippins to the summer sky. Here in the shade comes
the sound of a nesting robin repeating her call, up
and down, declaring,

“This is my branch, my nest, it’s mine, it’s mine,
it’s me.”

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