He died in the peach orchard that year,
after a long and futile battle with the hail and the winds.
The August was awful and mighty
and it killed him.
His grip was lost and
fell to the ground with an anticlimactic plush
a sound not at all conducive to
an echo through the trees.
The clothes fell like dirty leaves from his body….

“I always wondered what clothes I’d be wearing
when I died.
Then I thought it wouldn’t matter much,
because they’d just clean me up to look my best anyway,
and buy me a tux or something.
Then they’d collect my life insurance and forget me in a year,
while I lay in the ground,
decomposing in some goddamn dinner jacket.”

The body – pit, leaves, and bones –
would begin to settle into the pores of the ground.
The pulp, being most liquid,
would seep in first.
Leaves and pit would follow.
The bones would take longest,
dissolving first to chalk,
then to dust….

“When I was a kid I was a damned brat.
I’d roll bubble gum between my fingers
and throw little bubblegumballs in Marsha Murray’s hair.
The teacher would catch me
and make me clap the chalkdust off the erasers after school.
It was among the clouds of chalk
that I began to wonder if this was the kind of dust
that people go to when they die.
But it was just the dust of dead words, I figured,
and I went on clapping.
I wonder whatever happened to Miss Benderson.”

The dust, so to speak, had settled now,
and formed new chemical reactions with the old substance
of the soil: there were molecules of Civil War veterans
and second-grade teachers who never married
and wore ancient scarab brooches,
bums who drank too hard
and bums who never touched a drop in their lives….

And when the pit had fallen to halves,
there was a nudge and a breaking-through of soil –

two leaves and a singular stem.


-1971

10/01/2001

Posted on 10/01/2001
Copyright © 2025 Bruce W Niedt