On nights with little moon or none,

the near-blind great-grandmother settles

in her chair in the middle of the orchard,

bare branches or new leaves or hard-green

or just-right or too-late pears

around her, depending,

and listens to the music of the spheres. She makes

a circle, a kind of moon, with thumbs and pointers

touching, and looks up through it to where the sisters

or the queen or the swan might be and waits

for the music to begin—whistling or humming

or bluesy harmonica or plaintive fiddle, sometimes

(she smiles at this) a harp

and all of it, lullaby or symphony, faint and strange.

Oftentimes, she stirs to find the night sky gone

and rises to the crackle of the sun waking up the pears.