FRUIT: IMPORTED

After Jericho Brown

 

Time to buy fruit, a relishing plethora

That I weigh, inspect for spots, to tell what’s ripe.

 

Dad would complain, How can you tell what’s ripe?

Fruit aisles sit sterile, barren of fragrance.

 

He remembered streets laden with fragrance

Of peaches and cherries far from the market.

 

Why buy peaches and cherries from the market

when you could pluck a dew-dabbed apple

 

From the manse orchard? He’d duck, grab an apple,

Dodge the priest’s clenched hand, hop over the wall.

 

His childhood was clenched behind the Berlin Wall,

Spent without tasting a single banana.

 

In the US, he tasted a banana,

Relished, for the first time, plethora.

 

 

 

END CREDITS

 

With magnetic goosebumps, we dangle our feet

over this blood orange edge, scan

 

clouds like ink blots, learn to mistrust

their shapelessness. They’re just droplets after all.

 

How often must we plummet? Even metronomes

have to stop. We hammer sunbeams like

 

piano strings along the way. The worst image

is a lengthening shadow. A severing can be a baptism, too.

 

 

 

PLANNER

 

I buy another, swayed by the streamline,

the siren call of pull-it-together. One place

to scribble to-do lists like a roadmap for life.

But, Eric, you know where this leads. Weeks

 

on end without a single drop of ink to stain

the smooth paper. All those spreads wasted.

Or rather saved, unspoiled, reams to house

my lifelong odyssey to embody the immaculate.

 

Because emptiness and potential are twins.

There is safety in the yet. Which was a word

that buoyed me through childhood. When I

looked at those large monthly calendars on

 

freshly bordered bulletin boards, imagination

popped the 2D dates into 3 so that ever since

I see days like blank boxes, convenient cubes

in which to stuff and corner adulthood, blocks

 

you cross out and then stack in the name of

success, layer by layer to build yourself a shrine,

a word which, in Old English, was a chest to keep

relics safe and now is just a kinder word

 

for tomb. As if chaos could be contained.

I think Pandora would laugh at that.

And maybe Hope never forgave her.

Maybe she’s always wanted

 

to breathe outside those four walls.