If you ask me, an orgy does have its opposites:
paper-clipped notes on a podium come close;
and also, the solitary yeti as he hunkers down
in a Himalayan blizzard, deciding firmly
that he refuses to eat his own feet no matter what;
even long lineages in the Bible, despite describing
generations of fruitful people gone forth in a froth
of multiplying — Bubba begat Bluto who begat
Jehosephat — even that is sorta the very deadpan
essence of anti-orgy. Finally, the orgy’s antithesis
dwells in how I’ve tried half my dullard life
to coax fruit from brittle stubborn sticks of trees,
to have my own little orchard, frost-threatened
blossoms heralding fruity blessings… but hell,
I’d settle for a single goddamn decent apple.
I was ten when I first bought an apple tree
and plugged it in the ground, jugging water to it
for several days, then watching it grow minimally
each year, my dad’s cattle stripping it of leaves
every summer when the grass dried tough. Then,
a dwarf orange tree — six or eight leaves on a stick
in a pot — that died in its window maybe a month
after forming a perfect green orange that swelled
to the size of a marble before falling to the dirt.
Now, behind my one-rowed chainlink vineyard
I keep a pair of sickly peach trees, one scrawny
apple, and two plums with some ambition,
but their fruit never fails to disappoint, rarely
yielding more than fuzzy hard knobs like velvet
knucklebones, littering the May-June lawn
with their undernourished suicides. I mow
them under, searching the boughs for one or two
blinks of color, something like a true fruit.
Chad Woody lives in Springfield, Missouri with wife Heather and daughter Penelope. Check out his books available on lulu.com: Eel and Bathing Beauty Both (poems), Uncle Knuckle’s Preposterous Narrations (all-ages stories), and Estranged Clone Reunion (essays & humor).