FIRST FRUIT

Woman wants
what her heart hears--
tree rustle, a flutter,
summer in the orchard--

and bites into flesh,
an hour's sweetness, bloom-
dusted scion.  The Sky
is fire. 

Mouth awry (a bitter
spitter), skin mottled
with flyspeck
and sooty blotch,

Eve treks
past autumn fruit--
fall, weight bent, down
a wilderness.   

I WISH TO MAKE A POEM

with Monongahela in it--
a name so primal one can hear
the honeyed water when
reading beside it of a Sunday,
or flicking flies in a tributary
for reticent trout.

Or when apprehending,
at day's pink window,    
the Great Blue Heron--
wakeful, frozen - a tugboat
churning, and thin towns
thinning, passing down.

Not having seen this mellifluous
river, flowing north
toward Pittsburgh,
I must imagine its limbless
current, its liquid rhythm
from a word.