After Pear-Picking / Geometry (First Sonnet)

Second version posted at PFFA.


version #1

After Pear-Picking

Geometry: You learn it in the wrecked,
entangled trees where garbage, broken glass,
and rats are tangents. Circled in the center,
equidistant from the killing points
encompassed on detectives' maps, the line
of alleys, streets, and parking lots is cubed
and divvied up. A problem to be solved
is how the sine wave vines have choked the growth.
You twist an arc of stem; the tapered sphere
of pyrus communis, as stubborn hard
as trig and calculus, as wonderful
as numbered shapes inside of shapes, resists.
Ballistics shows the bullet miss the mark
at only minus two degrees of arc.

-----

version #2

Geometry

You find geometry among the wrecked,
entangled trees: the curve of hemisphere
and taper, shape on top of shape. A pear
that sine-wave vines have failed to protect
hangs perpendicular to broken glass,
a rusted green above the city mulch.
The fruit is stubborn-hard, like trig. You clutch,
but nothing here resembles calculus.
The area of Collinwood is known
from Five Point Square to up on Nottingham
as Shooting Row, a parallelogram
of ammunition, gun, and bullet drone,
a gauntlet, ghetto, seedy neighborhood.
You figure, if it grows, it must be good.

-----

The first sonnet I ever attempted. I ignored rhyme - except for the final couplet - so I could get through the darn thing with something resembling pentameter. Then I attempted revision with rhyme with so-so results. I now leave them be.