Maclura Pomifera by Frederick Wilbur

          for Elizabeth, eighty years on

October angles the sun
in a relieving beauty,
creeks are lean,
fields of soybeans browning.

After the equinox,
several Osage oranges
roll from the fencerow tree,
yellow-green knobbles
in the ragged grass.

For years, I count them
as my grandfather did
at his gray house in Connecticut.

These several are the harbingers
of perhaps twenty or more
to be gathered into bucket
or wheelbarrow.

They seem a fortuitous harvest
like those lucks I save for winter,
useful beyond their beauty.

As long as I am able,
now in my aches and forgettings,
I will tally them
to measure the years
and throw them into woods
with a boy’s glee.



Frederick Wilbur’s poetry collections are As Pus Floats the Splinter Out, Conjugation of Perhaps, The Heft of Promise and the forthcoming Is to Say. He is poetry co-editor for Streetlight Magazine. He was awarded the Stephen Meats Poetry Prize for best poem of the year by Midwest Quarterly (2018).