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Gratefulness
We can’t believe our luck: to have found this pair of pears on the ground in the grass, in the abandoned orchard late in the year, spared as if by fate, unmarred and, we tell ourselves, ours.
Furtively, we seize them, glancing sidelong like thieves, rubbing them against our shirts, our palms, inhaling the faint perfume of their ripeness before biting in—like savages, we imagine, though imagining makes us not, makes us the self-conscious creatures we are, knowing full-well we have done nothing to earn this, do not deserve it, but that the pleasure we take makes us worthy of taking, our happiness a form of gratitude, refusing grace a blasphemy more grave than greed.
Left alone, they would go to waste. Kept for later they would bruise and rot. Now is the only time for joy. Here the only place. And you, My Love, are the only one—so let us eat, and praise, and walk among these gnarled trees before we lie beneath them.
From Notwithstanding, (Wet Cement Press, 2019). Posted by kind permission of Wet Cement Press.
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