Stigmata

March 31 2015

Wild blueberries

are small, dark, intense.

While in the clear pint box

you bought in the corner store

they’re flabby and pale

unnaturally large.

There is a secluded patch

deep in the woods

you keep to yourself.

Unless the bears got there first,

branches stripped

scat in the underbrush.

You rake loosely opened hands

through the dense green bush

and the ripe ones come cleanly away.

While the over-ripe

turn to mush,

sticky sweet

the corruption of yeast.

The exquisite temptation of purple fruit

its precious seed.

Because like sex and love, and the tingle of lust

it all comes down

to reproduction.

Forgetting

that beneath the bright outer layer

the pulp is pale;

that beauty is skin deep

sweetness transient.

You gorge, eating by the handful,

lips stained

fingers painted blue.

Like all sin

you feel the shame;

the gluttony

your face proclaims,

the hands you cannot hide.

How did I come to write about picking blueberries at the end of March? Simply because as I sat down to write -- and with no idea what to write about -- I had a slice of my famous (?!!) blueberry-banana bread in hand. I always make it with wild, never farmed. And always wondered why they're so different. (Not to mention how they harvest such small delicate fruit. By hand? Or some outlandish Rube Goldberg type machine?!!)

I may have taken a bit of poetic license. As I recall, the last time I ate farmed blueberries they were pretty sweet, not the watered-down version I depict here. But there is a general rule that works with fruit: that smaller is more intense, while bigger is usually washed-out and thinner in taste.

Wild grown are supposed to be healthier: more concentrated in those desirable anti-oxidants. Which is a natural response to stress. While the domesticated berries are protected, watered, and fertilized, the wild stuff has to deal with drought and predation and poor soil: adversity toughens them, and forces on them the metabolic cost of producing these complex but protective chemicals.

I like the line about the bears. Even though there is absolutely no reason to include it. Except that it reinforces this idea of the prime secret spot every picker jealously guards. And also that every time I read it, I can’t help but smile ;-) ...

This poem was a fun bit of mischief to write:  taking an innocent pleasure, then investing it with connotations of sin. But it really is all about sex: the tempting berry, exploiting us to propagate its seed. 

This was neither an inspiration nor a perspiration poem. Not inspiration, because not only did I sit down to write with absolutely nothing in mind, I wasn’t even that much in the mood. But not perspiration, either:  because it came as easily as taking dictation. So perhaps I need to come up with a third category:  something about the elusive muse and the mystery of the creative act.