Authors: Kevin Young
The Hungry Ear (19 page)
Silver dust,
lifted from the earth,
higher than my arms reach,
you have mounted,
O, silver,
higher than my arms reach,
you front us with great mass;
no flower ever opened
so staunch a white leaf,
no flower ever parted silver
from such rare silver;
O, white pear,
your flower-tufts
thick on the branch
bring summer and ripe fruits
in their purple hearts.
We sliced the watermelon into smiles.
We sliced the watermelon into smiles.
We sliced the watermelon into smiles.
We sliced the watermelon into smiles.
We sliced the watermelon into smiles.
We sliced the watermelon into smiles.
We sliced the watermelon into smiles.
We sliced the watermelon into smiles.
We sliced the watermelon into smiles.
We sliced the watermelon into smiles.
We sliced the watermelon into smiles.
We sliced the watermelon into smiles.
We sliced the watermelon into smiles.
We sliced the watermelon into smiles.
Green Buddhas
On the fruit stand.
We eat the smile
And spit out the teeth.
My hands are murder-red. Many a plump head
drops on the heap in the basket. Or, ripe
to bursting, they might be hearts, matching
the blackbird's wing-fleck. Gripped to a reed
he shrieks his ko-ka-ree in the next juicy field.
He's left his peck in some juicy cheeks, when
at first blush and mostly white, they
showed streaks of sweetness to the marauder.
We're picking near the shore, the morning
sunny, a slight wind moving rough-veined leaves
our hands rumple among. Fingers find by feel
the ready fruit in clusters. Flesh was perfect
yesterday. ⦠June was for gorging. â¦
sweet hearts young and firm before decay.
“Take only the biggest, and not too ripe,”
a mother calls to her girl and boy, barefoot
in the furrows. “Don't step on any. Don't
change rows. Don't eat too many.” Mesmerized
by the largesse, the children squat and pull
and pick handfulls of rich scarlets, half
for the baskets, half for avid mouths.
Soon, whole faces are stained.
A crop this thick begs for plunder. Ripeness
wants to be ravished, as udders of cows when hard,
the blue-veined bags distended, ache to be stripped.
Hunkered in mud between the rows, sun burning
the back of our necks, we grope for, and rip loose
soft nippled heads. If they bleedâtoo softâ
let them stay. Let them rot in the heat.
When, hidden away in a damp hollow under moldy
leaves, I come upon a clump of heart-shapes
once red, now spiderspit-gray, intact but empty,
still attached to their dead stemsâ
families smothered as at PompeiiâI rise
and stretch. I eat one more big ripe lopped
head. Red-handed, I leave the field.
If this is a thing of the past,
planting strawberries on the Delaware River
and eating zucchini from my own garden,
then I will have to be buried too,
along with the beer-hall musicians
and the “startlingly beautiful sunset”
and the giant Swiss pansies,
in the ruins of Pennsylvania.
I put the strawberries in one by one.
They look like octopuses and their feet dance in the water
as I cover them up to their necks.
They take up so much room
that I could eat an acre of them for breakfast
sitting in the dirt.
What I like best is having a garden this close to
the factories and stores of Easton.
It is like carrying a knife in my pocket!
It is like kissing in the streets!
I would like to convert all the new spaces
back into trees and rocks.
I would like to turn the earth up after the bulldozers
have gone and plant corn and tomatoes.
I would like to guard our new propertyâwith helmets and dogs.
I would like us to feed ourselves in the middle of their civilization.
Blackberries are back. They cling near
little streams. Their eyes, bright mornings,
make tunnels through the vines.
They see their own thorns in the sky,
and the print of leaves.
At night they hide inside the wind,
ready to try the outdoors on.
They swing for distance, root for
fidelity. The truth is your only ransom
once they touch your tongue.
Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries,
Blackberries on either side, though on the right mainly,
A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea
Somewhere at the end of it, heaving. Blackberries
Big as the ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes
Ebon in the hedges, fat
With blue-red juices. These they squander on my fingers.
I had not asked for such a blood sisterhood; they must love me.
They accommodate themselves to my milkbottle, flattening their sides.
Overhead go the choughs in black, cacophonous flocksâ
Bits of burnt paper wheeling in a blown sky.
Theirs is the only voice, protesting, protesting.
I do not think the sea will appear at all.
The high, green meadows are glowing, as if lit from within.
I come to one bush of berries so ripe it is a bush of flies,
Hanging their bluegreen bellies and their wing panes in a Chinese screen.
The honey-feast of the berries has stunned them; they believe in heaven.
One more hook, and the berries and bushes end.
The only thing to come now is the sea.
From between two hills a sudden wind funnels at me,
gapping its phantom laundry in my face.
These hills are too green and sweet to have tasted salt.
I follow the sheet path between them. A last hook brings me
To the hills' northern face, and the face is orange rock
That looks out on nothing, nothing but a great space
Of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths
Beating and beating at an intractable metal.
Fringing the woods, the stone walls, and the lanes,
Old thickets everywhere have come alive,
Their new leaves reaching out in fans of five
From tangles overarched by this year's canes.
They have their flowers too, it being June,
And here or there in brambled dark-and-light
Are small, five-petaled blooms of chalky white,
As random-clustered and as loosely strewn
As the far stars, of which we now are told
That ever faster do they bolt away,
And that a night may come in which, some say,
We shall have only blackness to behold.
I have no time for any change so great,
But I shall see the August weather spur
Berries to ripen where the flowers wereâ
Dark berries, savage-sweet and worth the waitâ
And there will come the moment to be quick
And save some from the birds, and I shall need
Two pails, old clothes in which to stain and bleed,
And a grandchild to talk with while we pick.
In a dream I meet
my dead friend. He has,
I know, gone long and far,
and yet he is the same
for the dead are changeless.
They grow no older.
It is I who have changed,
grown strange to what I was.
Yet I, the changed one,
ask: “How you been?”
He grins and looks at me.
“I been eating peaches
off some mighty fine trees.”
No easy thing to bear, the weight of sweetness.
Song, wisdom, sadness, joy: sweetness
equals three of any of these gravities.
See a peach bend
the branch and strain the stem until
it snaps.
Hold the peach, try the weight, sweetness
and death so round and snug
in your palm.
And, so, there is
the weight of memory:
Windblown, a rain-soaked
bough shakes, showering
the man and the boy.
They shiver in delight,
and the father lifts from his son's cheek
one green leaf
fallen like a kiss.
The good boy hugs a bag of peaches
his father has entrusted
to him.
Now he follows
his father, who carries a bagful in each arm.
See the look on the boy's face
as his father moves
faster and farther ahead, while his own steps
flag, and his arms grow weak, as he labors
under the weight
of peaches.
From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted
Peaches
.
From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes this familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.
O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
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Crave Radiance: New and Selected Poems 1990â2010
. Copyright © 1997 by Elizabeth Alexander. Reprinted with the permission of the Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Graywolf Press,
www.graywolfpress.org
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