A bald eagle in a riverside fir stares at the uncarved faces of a thousand pumpkins sagging into frost behind a barn of faded planks. Hours pass. Who will blink first? It is that sort of morning for the heart; the living are giving the dead an honest test.

A man has walked out to be alone with the earth. A man of his age, he equates time with grief most days, but now he has decided to wait. In the silence, where do his raised eyes fit?

I'm not that man, I'm not between the fir and the rot of the pumpkin fields, but I'll pick up the gauntlet of his morning nonetheless,

stand to the side...

Thanksgiving: Summers we'd give thanks to be city born and bred when, come mid-August, our country cousins trudged two weeks ahead to the stern task of learning, the clean-cut drudgery of school. Of course, in October we'd curse the luck that gave them a fortnight repeal of break-knuckle rules - though what could be worse than digging potatoes in muck-caked fields? Who, in their right minds, would envy that chore, and pray - in late November, a thousand miles and many years away - to restore themselves by the grace of clay-coated hands? Elbow-deep in a sack of unscrubbed spuds, we swear never...

Shawna Lemay scrutinizes some of the best-known art masterpieces of the Western world, alerting her readers to the power and peril of seduction. All the God-sized Fruit melds the sister arts - poetry and painting - in a sensual exploration of history, forgery, and violation. In poems rich with sensory pleasure, Lemay explores the place where image and inspiration meet.