Ugly Fruit
April 3 2015


A few orphaned tomatoes
left in the bin.

Hard ones, picked green.
The skinny, teeny

twinned.

The rotten, softened, squished,
spotted

with blemishes.

The motley, oblong, odd
malformed, and misbegot.

The different

that languish unbought.

Which I have always preferred
to their uniform cousins,

pretty, but in-bred.
Tomatoes with character.
Determined contrarians,
homely, and various
much like the rest of us.
And maybe the self-serving thought
that looks, and flavour, trade off
-- delicious fruit, under the skin,
the virtuous man
with the plain exterior.

Romas are working-class fruit,
meaty, and modest, and tough.
A bunch
bask in the sun
on my kitchen counter,
the odd, the queer, the freaks,
the mocked, uncommon, unique.

The spurned
rescued from the bottom of the bin
now ripened, and reddened, and sweet,
redolent
of summer's heat,
the warm loamy soil
in which they grew.

Ugly fruit
I do not judge.
Rejects,
returning my love
with gusto. 

I really do always go for the odd and orphaned fruit. Especially tomatoes: the homely looking ones, the ones with character, the ones most everyone else passes over.

The other day, there was a pathetically small collection left in a corner of the bin. They weren't so much malformed as over-ripe and squishy. But romas are amazingly durable, and I figured the soft ones would still be good if I used them that day. In fact, they were superb: ugly fruit that would have soon gone off, but were at the peak of flavour. Glad they weren't wasted.

I love tomatoes. They are the most versatile fruit (and yes, they're technically a fruit, not a vegetable) and I use them in everything. I noticed my latest bunch soaking up some early spring sun on the kitchen counter, and realized that not only hadn't I ever written an ode to the beloved tomato, but that this would be the third in what's becoming a sequence of fruit-themed poems -- after Seedless Orange and Wild Blueberries. A nice trifecta of citrus, berry, and tender fruit!

I've used a lot of lists here. I have my doubts about lists: that it's lazy poetry, piling it on until the reader is sure to get the idea; that eyes soon glaze over, and the words stop computing; that the usual set of 3 becomes formulaic. One might even imagine that all you need to write poetry is a good thesaurus!

On the other hand, I like the celebration of words, the richness of language. I like the way the nuance builds, word-by-word. And when said out loud -- that is, recited (the way poetry should be consumed) -- the rat-a-tat sound of a tight list makes wonderful music.

There is an essentially contradictory push and pull in poetry: on the one hand, the urge to compress and distil, along with the delight of allusion and imprecision; and on the other, a celebration of language, as well as the power of words to precisely communicate to a listener the writer's vision. Lists belong to the latter school of poetry. Which is a lot less work for the reader, and a different kind of fun. The word "accessible" comes to mind. The only question is whether that word is said with approval, or with the supercilious sneer of the academic poet. As for me, I much prefer accessible (or, as Billy Collins says, "hospitable") to obscure.