Strange Fruit

At Noon we were picking plums in the orchard. The dog was bored, asleep by the fence, and the dragonflies rampaged among the trees. Tonight I'm in Babylon, twelve stories up at the top of a gnarled old 20th century hotel and from my window I can see a very different kind of orchard in the never-dark, seasonless spinning of the city. Through the wet window office buildings and hotels cluster around. All are lit. Some are festooned with white light, like blossom. Through the bloating raindrops, I can see cherries and quinces, plums and damsons. Streetlights are crabapples and qumqwats. Alleyways are sloes. The lights of police cars and ambulances twinkle like moths and the day-bretheren of the moth. People working late or otherwise, worm around some of the glowing fruit-rooms. A police-van stumbles like a stag beetle toward a cluster of bright lights on the other side of a railway bridge. A helicopter searches overhead, its light stirring the ground like a silver spoon. There is a park, in the distance, which is jet-black in this light, and the street-trees are absences in the harvest.