i miss my father tonight. i cut myself a slice of a grand green pear
i imagine my hands are larger and rougher around the knife,
i set the slice on a plate for myself; sweet, grown out of nothing,
plucked by the hands of a vineyardist who toiled for the
soft perfumery of a perfect green pear, shining in the myopia of my tired eyes.

that interchange–the greatest diversion from the eden of my memorialized pears;
that any other hands have touched its quilled skin but mine and my father’s,
when he’d like to tell me something but doesn’t feel that his words can convey it
he hands me a cross-section–a careful fragment of the holy fruit
pulled fresh from the heavy-laden twig of a tree in the garden.

his pear was not this one–this one who came to me nestled in a sea of others,
telling me nothing about its journey, its influences, nor the sunlight that nursed it;
his pear was the first of the season; on warming winter evenings i sat beneath it as it grew, 
i saw its clusters of furled leaves catch moonlight and smile, waxen veins twinkling;
i know his pear to be the harvested gift of my mother’s, 
i know her to have coaxed its gentle roots into the warm soil.

my father hands me a slice of the pear he’s incised on the cutting board.
he means to tell me he loves me but can’t think of a way to spin sound from the stillness;
i savor the feeling of biting into it; precious, delicate, sandy on the back of my teeth;
i know it was born of love, of slivers of moonlight through its branches, and the whisper
of earthworms working the soil beneath a million woody roots reaching
with the pear there is a place next to my father at the table, with his silent love and the soil’s;
i slice my golden pear and think of him.

C. V. Hansen is a student and great lover of the written word studying English literature at Whitman College and is proud to call Western Washington home. Their work has been published in the Whitman affiliated journals of arts and literature Blue Moon, and Quarterlife, as well as in the nationally renowned newspaper The Whitman Wire, at which they are employed as an Opinion Columnist.