Given to us for our wedding by my wife’s family:
a handmade pottery bowl from Louisiana
glazed white as cream with a thin dark blue rim 
and large fleur-de-lis around the exterior. 

Having limited space to display things in our home,
it stayed inside a kitchen cabinet among other breakables
during most of our marriage’s first four years
until recently being brought out at summer harvest 

when we noticed our local orchard’s subscription boxes
contained some fruit not yet ripe enough to eat;
out of its packed confines where it was isolated 
from our partnership’s daily life – the joys, 

mundane and profound which we are blessed with 
by fortune, as well as the moments of strife, 
due to carelessness or misunderstanding – 
the bowl now sits on a wood table in our dining room. 

There it receives afternoon sun through a window 
facing west. Every week, it hosts nectarines, 
apricots, and pears whose skin is still tough against
our eager teeth, whose flesh has not yet sweetened.

Fingers gently probe the bounty embraced in the curve 
of this bowl, checking readiness for union with our bodies, 
and the fruit lets us know it will soon satisfy our craving, 
provided a little time and adequate light.