This week’s poem, Jefferson Navicky’s “The Peach Trees of Pray Hill Road,” offers a paean to canning as antidote to sadness. I love how deftly this prose poem follows the thread of peaches, from a woman’s grief all the way back to her white-frocked girlhood. I also love what powerful and visceral medicine she finds she finds in the act of preserving.
Navicky is the author of four books, most recently “Head of Island Beautification for the Rural Outlands” (2023) as well as “Antique Densities: Modern Parables & Other Experiments on Short Prose” (2021), which won the 2022 Maine Literary Award for poetry. He works as the archivist for the Maine Women Writers Collection. He will be speaking about his latest book this summer at Ruth Moore Days on July 21 at the Bass Harbor Memorial Library.
The Peach Trees of Pray Hill Road
provided an unexpected solace. She used the oak ladder she’d purchased for twenty dollars from a yard sale to climb to the upper regions of the tree to pluck the peaches. It was autumn and the loose leaves fell around her like a veil. To wish not to think about it was still to think about it, still to suffer from its golden turning. And when, chatting with friends, she forgot her sadness, a sudden word would change her expression, like a woman with an affliction whom some clumsy person carelessly touched.
The production of the peaches, peeling, slicing, flavoring and canning, gave her an action that held the sadness still and when, like a chemist’s wall of tinctures, she placed the last jar sealed on the shelf in the garage, the accumulation created a quorum whose weight pulled her back through an imagined past of canning seasons as a young girl in New England, along the Connecticut River and Marlborough County, the dam along Arrow Road at the western end of the reservoir, the coon cat chasing a chipmunk beneath the red radio flyer wagon, the platform at Perry Road where she ran and danced in a white frocked dress with her sister as her mother stood at the platform edge, singing “Wild Mountain Thyme” as the sun glinted white as glass.
— Jefferson Navicky
Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “The Peach Trees of Pray Hill Road,” copyright © 2023 by Jefferson Navicky. Reprinted from “Head of Island Beautification for the Rural Outlands” (AC Books). It appears by permission of the author.
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