common fruit

Sitting at a terrace beneath a sky flowering distant circles of light
a young man tells me on the Ananas de Courtrai,
a pear lush and upstream sweet, more or less modelled and coloured as a quince,
familiar to many a garden during 18th and 19th century.
A certain George Washington, he says, introduced what is still known to be instant coffee.
He saw a cup dated 5000 before Christ, hidden in the cellar of a local archive,
and admits it is the most beautiful thing ever he saw.