Revisionist Poetry – Autumn’s Fruit, v.2

In late harvest light, a wooden crate tips—
a river of nobbled gourds pooling on straw:
squat globes, long-necked lanterns, sun-browned maps
mottled with ochre, chartreuse, and bruise.

Each one a small, knotted country — scored
by sun and rain, ribbed with winter’s memory,
its pockmarks and scars the kind of language
that names droughts and late frosts without a shout.

They shift and click under the cool wind,
their skins smelling faint of hay and dry earth,
and the moon, already a thin coin, listens.

I crouch close to learn what these slow bodies say:
not the old word “abundance,” but the exact weight
of gathered midsummer folded into now.