Creek Running North

The streets are littered with trampled fruit. They are Bradford pears, too small and insipid to bother eating. Even the ants leave them alone.

The persimmon’s leaves have turned their orange and fall to earth two at a time. Asian pear leaves are aspen yellow now, and the cherry’s oxblood.

Each night the moon rises fifty minutes later, in a clicking of barn owl and far off train.

Smoke curls from the neighbor’s chimney. His truck is loaded to break the leaf springs, a cord and a half of oak. We close the windows against the smoke. It seeps in through the attic.

I eye the apple tree, planning next month’s pruning cuts.

Three weeks ago a cry caught Zeke and me on our walk. It was the local red shouldered hawk chased by a gull. But not a gull: one of the white-tailed kites that roost in the pines a block away. They skirmished behind a neighbor’s house, and I heard the hawk’s pathetic calls dwindling in the distance. I smiled and pulled Zeke two steps up the hill. He resisted. I knelt and stroked his head. I heard labored breathing above. It was the hawk. Twenty feet above us, it looked desperate to get to the trees. The kite swooped in from behind it, harassed it, nearly hit it but pulled up at the last minute. I heard the rush of air through its wings.

Tonight the trees sleep, buds folding and enfolding beneath the bark. When the leaves have fallen I will get my saw. Take the wood off above a bud, and it will push out a new branch. Upper buds secrete a hormone that suppresses growth: it travels down each branch from the tips. Take off the terminal bud and all beneath it on the stem will burst out branches. Cut out any wood that crosses. Branches that aim straight up never bear. Only limbs that struggle hard against the earth are fruitful. The ground is littered with the sweet husks of Asian pears, rotting where the worms have gotten them.