All the trees are empty of persimmons; only the oranges are left.
They are sold on Thursdays by a bent-back hag out of her front
room,
grey wooden pallets full of fruit, water beading and freezing
on their rough, bright skin.

Steam from her kitchen, a batch of sweet-bean manju buns,
wafts out in warm, white puffs.

Sparrows collect in the dead grass, picking withered berries from
the ice,
fluttering up between the branches as I shuffle
in new boots to the train station, the brown earth lifting into the sky.

The leaves turned so late this year.
I do not think it will snow.

But the monks bang their drums at dusk
and tie their prayers to dead branches all the same.

November is a silent month
when the islands sit
uneasy on the sea.

The harbor-waves wash rusted bicycles onto the sand,
jellyfish tangled in their spokes.
Five hundred miles south, there is one tree left, outside Kyoto,
which has not dropped its persimmons like a thief´s purse.

It stands on the edge of a winter lake, throwing fire
into the water.









Catherynne M. Valente is the author of The Labyrinth and Yume no Hon: The Book of Dreams, as well as three collections of poetry: Apocrypha, Music of a Proto-Suicide and Oracles: A Pilgrimage. Between novels she occasionally moonlights as a literary critic. She currently lives in Virginia with her husband and two dogs.

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