He tells me it is a marvel of engineering,
sending stalks ten feet high
to create songbird perches above the goldenrod.
We look at asters: one a cultivar whose flowers shine
an otherworldly blue, the second a wild one, shyer, whiter.
He points to the trees he planted thirty years ago,
the walnut and two Asian pears. Last night the walnuts
clattered down the roof. They rumbled, they exploded,
they knocked and clicked as if opening a door.
Standing among their green husks
he says they only do it once a year.
He is back from Chicago where he saw a specialist,
and his wife, though she won’t say it, is worried.
We slow down to admire a scattering of burnweed
raising its spiky branching crowns of downy seeds.
If I leave them long enough, he says, they become beautiful.
—
Ralph Earle is the author of Everything You Love Is New (Redhawk, 2024) and The Way the Rain Works (Sable Books, 2015). A New England native, he has lived in North Carolina for 40 years. Ralph has worked as a poetry teacher, writer, editor, bookstore proprietor, technical writer, and website designer. Thrice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, his poems have appeared in The Sun, Tar River Poetry, The Carolina Quarterly, Sufi Journal, and elsewhere.
