Ed Harkness

Italian Prune

Wounded, scarred, the tree’s been dying for years.
Sap has oozed into glass nodes the color
of whiskey, limbs lichen-sleeved—tufts robins
yank at nesting time. Each March, buds unfold

into ovate leaves. Last year’s prune harvest
was sparse—less than a dozen hard green nubs
swelled into dusky purple eggs. Squirrels
made off with them in a single morning.

I’ve thought to cut it down. I’m not sure why
I haven’t done so. That’s me all over:
sure and unsure, depending on the month.
My ladder stands near as tall as the tree.

Uncertain how to grow despite its age,
its arthritic trunk is the size of my calf.
Ten minutes, my limb saw would bring it down.
I’d do it now if it weren’t for the spiked

white blossoms that will appear overnight
come mid-April, more startling than spring snow,
their fragrance almost too faint to detect—
an imagined tang, like honey-sweetened

lemonade in a glass across the room.
I can’t count the times I’ve stood here,
saw in gloved hand, ready to do the deed,
then walked back to the tool shed, hung the saw

on its nail and called it a day. This day,
November’s bitter chill has settled in.
Most leaves have dropped, strewn like potato skins.
I might have retraced my steps to the shed

but for a patch of afternoon sunlight
in an upper branch, catching a spider
hard at it, knotting one strand of its net
to the next with its eight knitting needles.

Unspooled from the spider’s brown spinneret,
the strands gleam, prismatic, iridescent,
as if the tiny pouch contained a star.
I might have cut this tree five years ago,

or last fall, or now, in the failing light.
That would mean the end of sweetness. There’d be
no prunes to savor (if saved from squirrels).
Instead of the tree, or the orb spider’s

electric wire that draws my jaded eye,
I suppose I’d be gazing absently
at power lines, crows on their way to roost,
or, drooped on a pole in my neighbor’s yard,

the limp cloth of an American flag.
If not for the fruit, then for the silver
thread the spider pulls from itself, for spiked
blossoms sure to come, for what vanishes,

what remains, for a tree that perseveres
in ill-health, for those I forgive, those who
forgive me, for the irreplaceable
world entire, the saw will stay on its nail.