THE PUMPKIN TREE

Up a lattice of sumac and into the spars

of the elderberry, the pumpkin vines had climbed,

and a week after first frost

great pendulous melons dangled like gods

among the bunches of lesser berries

and the dazzled, half-drunken birds.

Then the pumpkins fell, one by one, each mythical fruit's

dried umbilicus giving way in a rush

of gold and a snow of elliptical leaves.

A skull thud, the dull thunk of rupture,

a thin smoke then, like a soul, like dust.

But the last, high up and lodged

in a palm of limbs and pithy branches,

sways now in the slightest breeze and freeze

after freeze caves in on itself

and will, by spring, cast its black

leathery gaze out over the garden

like the mummy of a saint or an infirm

and dessicated pope.  Below, where the others fell,

that seed not eaten by winter birds,

one, say, buried in meat and sheath

of skin, will rise.  From its blunt,

translucent nubbin, a leaf trifoliate

and a stalk as succulent as bamboo, it will climb

blithe as a baby Christ up the knees

of the wood it cannot know it is bound for.