Picked Green
Aug 7 2016


Supermarket tomatoes 
are picked green.
In my muscle memory
I can feel the resistance 
of unripe fruit
firmly attached to its stem;
like a warm-blooded creature, weaned too young
reluctantly pulled from the breast.

Hard green spheres
that will not bruise
no matter what,
dumped into buckets, poured into trucks.
Then, in a trick of chemistry, gassed;
temptingly red
utterly bland.

While a fresh tomato
grown in the sun on a backyard vine
is exquisitely ripe,
smelling of summer
sweet, and tart.
That savoury taste
the Japanese have called umami,
like Parmesan, and beef-steak.

It slips from the plant
like tender fruit
fully ready to part.
Red skin, soft pulp, small yellow seeds.
That spurt of juice
that drips down your chin
sticks to eager hands. 


This poem was once again inspired by a Writer’s Almanac offering. 

I often turn there when I’m at a loss for what to write. Because I’m encouraged to see “legitimate” poetry (that is, validated by publication, as well as by Garrison Keillor’s imprimatur) concerning itself with the small diurnal things of life, when there is a temptation to try to write about the profound and philosophical. And because for me, the attraction is most often in the writing itself, rather than in having something important to say. So really, any idea I can steal is welcome. 

I never refer back to the original piece as I write, and usually haven’t even read it at all closely in the first place; but nevertheless, it’s great fun to go back and contrast and compare our different takes on a vaguely related topic. So here is where Picked Green began:


Tomatoes on Interstate 5  (by Albert Garcia)


Trucks roll down I-5, trailers full
of tomatoes. Almost always
they’ll spill a few as they round a corner, 

hard, small fruit
bouncing over asphalt,
a bright scattering of red

on the road’s shoulder
of star thistle and tarweed.
Maybe you left the house

angry over an argument with your wife,
words in the air
like a whining fan belt. Maybe

you’re headed down the freeway
because it’s the fastest way out
of town and you’re suddenly sick

of the same streets and just have to drive
to something new. You’re in your car,
mind dulled by the flatness of rice fields,

their green monotony, when somewhere
in your vision’s periphery a pheasant
coasts over the road

almost hitting the big rig in front of you.
The trucker taps his breaks
and it happens: spilling, filling your view,

tomatoes bouncing around your car
in a flash of color so sudden
you wonder if this is real

or if it’s something else that’s made
your pulse quicken, your grip
tighten on the wheel. In the rearview

you see them roll onto the shoulder’s
hot gravel, and you can’t help it—
you keep glancing in the mirror,

feeling lucky, wanting to say something
though no one is sitting
beside you, and you drive

until the small red dots are gone
and the road bends
into the dreary gray grove of olives.

“Tomatoes on Interstate 5” by Albert Garcia from A Meal Like That. © Brick Road Press, 2015.


I know I’ve recently written a similar poem (The Smell of a Ripe Tomato - June 1), but having another go always turns up interesting challenges and opportunities for fun. And even though they’re both explorations of sensory experience, I think they’re different enough to stand. 

And I suppose I should once again reiterate that tomatoes are, technically, fruit; not vegetables! A fruit contains its own seeds. Re-casting tomatoes as an everyday vegetable was a clever marketing strategy that dates from the turn of the last century, in the early days of industrial agriculture and long distance transport by rail.