let summer and winter both

simmer inside, for it is

a fall fruit whose name in China

means separation, though only the fearful

won’t eat one with those they love.

To grow a tree from seed,

you’ll need a garden

and a grafting quince, bees, a ladder,

shears, a jug; you’ll need water

and patience, sun and mud,

a reverence for the elders

who told no true stories

of this fruit’s origin,

wanting to give us the freedom

of one thing that’s pleasure alone.

Cool and sweet, cellular and stony,

this is the fruit I’ll never die for,

nor come back from the dead

for a single taste.

The juice of the pear

shines on my cheeks.

There is no curse in it. I’ll eat

what I like and throw the rest

to the grasses. The seeds

will find whatever soils they were meant for.

Pythagorean

Pythagorean

Arguing, in answer to the joking

question posed by their dinner’s host,

that humankind’s distinguishing feature

must be empathy, the young lawyer finds himself

thinking suddenly of his mother.

A poor woman, not in money, as he would tell

his friends, but kindness, she raised him

and his brother during the two

lost decades she spent struggling

with alcoholism. Which kept him sober

through his twenties, until DC,

where on a dare one night

he went to a hotel bar to order

Jameson after Jameson whiskey, neat: curiosity

having finally compelled him to see

if he might feel some part of his mother’s

deep, sweet craving take root in him; some

heritable need that might make him feel

sympathy for her who once, drunk and in a rage,

broke his five-year-old brother’s arm.

It was almost disappointing to see

how easily he could push away

the drink; as disappointing as when he’d learned

his mother only stopped when a doctor

said she had to, not out of any love

for her children but out of terror

for herself, retaining to the last,

he thought, an essential selfishness. Empathy

was not the starting point of change

for her but fear: sobriety seemed only

to clarify an essential indifference

she must have felt for them, whetting the knife’s

edge of her later self-pity, just as he found his own

disinterest in drink made him feel

both less forgiving toward his mother

and more alone. We can’t anticipate

our effect on others, because we cannot read

all the data that surround us, argues

the mathematician now, interrupting

the lawyer’s thoughts, as he lists for the table

all the usual horrors: landfills, oil leaks

in the Gulf of Mexico, California either flooding

or out of water. We exist only

in the data, he continues, numbers

inside a formula that’s constantly changing:

the whole thing moving together

like a flock of starlings, he finishes, glancing

at the literature professor across from him to see

how she has taken this flourish. His wife,