How to Know Exactly When to Eat a Pear, and: Ward

Abstract

How to Know Exactly When to Eat a Pear, and: Ward Caleb A. P. Parker (bio) How to Know Exactly When to Eat a Pear Dear Dad, I've heard this cough of yours referredto as a rattle. Don't demand exactvocabulary. Don't demand the wordpreceding rattle. Find it in your ChapStick,in the mottle of your bone-thin thighs,and in the way you've followed up I loveyou with enormously, well chosen, likethe snow-ripe pear you ate so slow becauseit was your last. The word was in your puke,amid the pear mush swirling in the bowl.Pretend it's just some letters: children's soup.Just spoon the letters up. Attempt to blow.Dear Dad. You're right. It's death. The word is death.Sounds soothing now, like pith or bittercress. [End Page 124] Ward I was instructed to keep the felled tree down, but it drifted upward in the closet-hot night, lifted with it a mess of moss, of tubes and straps. Going vertical, and with a wooden caterwaul, the tree nearly unchopped itself. I jumped and caught a flying strap. I dug my heels into the loam. From beneath, my father yelled to let him go. I wondered if the tree—with its smooth and muscled bark—was, in fact, a horse. I offered it a sugar cube. The tree said, I am not a horse. The horse ran off into a wilder night. Again, my father: Please, just let me go. I feared that he had lost his mind. He was a fall risk. His sodium had dropped two nights before. Above, my father is the tree because I held him down by the shoulders while he fought me, angry and gown-naked, for the right to stand and use the bathroom unassisted. Above, he is the horse because the horse runs off, or else because the horse is never there. The horse is not a horse. The horse is the suggestion of a horse. [End Page 125] Caleb A. P. Parker Caleb A. P. Parker is a writer and musician from the Texas Gulf Coast. He is currently the Martha Meier Renk Distinguished Graduate Fellow in Poetry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Copyright © 2022 University of Nebraska Press