Kathleen Hart | The Architecture of Joy | Glass: A Journal of Poetry

September 2017

Kathleen Hart

The Architecture of Joy

Italian Grows Forgotten Fruit. What She Preserves is a Culture. — The New York Times

Even as you wait for the surgeon to walk down the hall,

for the story to break, for the storm to pass, for the other shoe

to drop, even as we speak

A Tuscan woman searches for the notations of orchards

in old estate catalogues and convent records, and even in the plans

for the gardens of the Medici Grand Dukes.

And then she walks through their lands, locating the vestiges

of these orchards in the few ancestor trees left standing,

and gathers branches with fresh buds to graft onto rootstock,

as has been done for thousands of years.

And so she assembles an orchard of apples and pears, cherries and figs,

that maintains its composure, standing as it does within its natural

confines, on small hills surrounded by a valley, the trees slanting

ever so slightly in the direction of the prevailing wind, within a rhythm

That a Medici Grand Duke must have felt as he surveyed his orchard

from his balcony, the exact intervals between each tree and the exact intervals

between each row intoning their breadth of line, their purity of tone

That the nuns walked through, allowing the blossoms of the convent trees

to make lattice work of their veils, a gradation of color so composed,

so balanced, that they are enclosed in steadfast love,

even as we speak.

My childhood backyard contained two rows of apple trees for a total of eight, which seemed to me to be the vestiges of an orchard. I always wondered what happened to the rest of the trees; I always saw them in my peripheral vision, and I was enchanted by their symmetry and grace. I was therefore quite taken with this story from the New York Times, in which a woman puts an orchard back together again on a literal level.

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