Hello and welcome back to the Daily Poem here in the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is by a poet named Eleanor Wiley. She lived from 1885 to 1928. And the poem that I'm

going to read is called Wild Peaches. It's a bit long, so I probably won't be able to read it twice,

but it's another poem that I really wanted to read to you.

I first discovered it in Harold Bloom's anthology, the best poems of the English language.

He includes it in the section next to Ezra Pound, which I find really interesting.

Eleanor Wiley was the literary editor of Vanity Fair, and apparently she was obsessed with

Shelley, as Harold Bloom writes, whose influence is manifest in much of her poetry.

And the poem that I'm going to read today, Wild Peaches, is actually a series of four sonnets.

It's a sequence of sonnets, and this is how it goes.

One.

When the world turns completely upside down,

you say we'll immigrate to the eastern shore

aboard a riverboat from Baltimore.

We'll live among wild peach trees,

miles from town.

You'll wear a coonskin cap and I a gown homespun,

dyed butternut's dark gold color.

Lost like your lotus-eating ancestor, we'll swim in milk and honey till we drown.

The winter will be short, the summer long, the autumn amber hued, sunny and hot.

Tasting of cider and of scuppernung.

All seasons sweet, but autumn best of all, the squirrels in their silver fur will fall like falling leaves, like fruit before you're shot.

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