Sandy Solomon: Pears, Lake, Sun

Pears on a sunlit ledge, flashes of lake,

how the poised world pressed itself

through the floating surface of that day,

how the manifest made its mark.


On the peeling ledge, pears leaned,

speckled, lopsided, more than yellow—

yellow squared—before an open window

through which flared a nosy, fluent breeze.


But would those pears, would that lake beyond them,

struck full of sun, would those images

have stuck so surely all these years without

the stamp of happiness to fix them there?


The proximate cause is gone. The moment stays

through the world’s facts: pears, lake, sun,

become now artifacts seeming finer

than the passing beauty of the world itself.


Even this noon I hold them up to praise

in the face of such brilliant fluidity

now that the eaves let slip their slick icicles

and snow eases again into the ground.

Copyright 1996 Sandy Solomon. From Pears, Lake, Sun (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996).

Sandy Solomon teaches at Vanderbilt University.