“A twitch of my fingers –
and I felt a weight in my palm
as I lay on the wet grass,
staring at my father’s death.
That cloud there. That blaze there.

Yet in my palm,
a tiny petrified mass of brain:
ridges, folds of the frontal lobe,
rifts, lines of the cerebellum.
All the reel and rut of matter

in the stubborn pattern of a peach-stone.
I picked at the pattern, numb,
scratching, searching
every groove, every curve,
every dry edge.

If a peach-stone is our brain,
is the vanished round of the peach our joy?
And is that joy sticky,
like peach-juice?
Does it run when we bite –

run down our mouth, our chin,
stick to fingers, knees,
t-shirts and flip-flops,
run everywhere,
boundless as tears?

Our life:
a glut of soft peach-flesh
with blood-purple skin,
fringed by white fur, holding it all in –
all of it – stone and bruise and wonder.

I stared at the peach-stone, wondering
had you bitten a peach here, Dad,
and laughed, as peach-juice
dribbled down your chin?
Before the rain began to spit –

and you dropped the peach-stone here,
beside the evergreen,
here, beneath the changing sky.”