Sometimes a peach is just a peach
Sometimes a peach is a portal.
If I call a peach something other than a peach
do its juices still run down my chin?
Does it still sit sticky in my mouth?
I think of your dead name,
how your father and I had searched the baby book
looking for the perfect name for you, a run
of black letters on the page,
pleasing curves and sounds,
an orange-fleshed word sweet on our tongues,
how it seemed made for you.
When I think of you now, it’s never with that name
in my mouth. That name is an absence,
shrivelled and brown,
a fly-blown fruit rotting on the ground.
A tree is a tree for its browns and greens, its cuts of sun
through branches, its soft bark against our fingers.
You are sugar-sweet buds on
a spring blossom tree,
renewed every day.
A peach,
a peach,
a peach
and
a portal.