This poem was recently revised, and due to formatting problems has been re-posted out of chronological order.

Sweetened by Frost

April 10 2011

It flowered briefly each spring.

A few days of overpowering fragrance,

then a carpet of blossoms

that turned quickly to rot

where it’s shady and damp

and grass won’t take.

Where gnarled roots

knuckle-up from the soil

like the veins on an old man’s hand.

His tenacity

their strength.

Or all at once

in a sudden gust of wind,

filling the air

like a swarm of small pink insects

who live for just a day.

And die once they mate,

littering the ground

like confetti after rain.

By fall, the fruit was ruby red

small and hard and sour,

crushed into the ground

or tossed at passing cars.

Which sometimes screeched to a stop,

and set us scattering

like a gun went off.

Or, egged-on by older brothers

the sour thing was eaten,

core, and all.

But in an early fall

that means a hard winter,

before the leaves have turned, the fruit has dropped

crab-apples are sweetened by frost,

and could be just as good

as their store-bought cousins.

Because it’s adversity

that confers toughness.

Orphaned fruit

touched by frost

feels like summer, again.

The beginning of spring:  an odd season to have written this.  The explanation is that this poem comes out of a fragment of a sentence, an allusive expression, I read, and couldn’t resist:  nothing at all to do with the season.

The weekend Globe has a regular Arts feature that reviews in bullet form 3 magazine cover stories. This one came from some obscure outdoor/adventure magazine. It was about scavenging for natural and “found” foods in Central Park (New York):  what to look for, and where; and how this is almost becoming a competitive sport; and whether it’s sustainable in such a small patch of wilderness.

There was a mention of “frost-sweetened crabapples,” 3 words in which I immediately sensed such irresistible tension, a series of implied opposites. There is the sense of sweetness juxtaposed with the notoriously sour fruit. There is  sense of the adversity of fall -- of longer days and increasing cold -- endowing them with sweetness:  of unexpected comfort in a season that implies adversity. And the compounding of two words that seem to cancel out:  of “frost” with “sweetened”. And finally, that the despised crab apple should have become so desirable.

So this was one of those inspirational (as opposed to “perspirational”) poems that come in a flash, and in which the writing seems much more like channelling than calculation and artifice. There is much about it I like, things I try to achieve in almost every poem I write:  the natural conversational rhythm, and internal rhyme that doesn’t seem intrusive or shoe-horned in; the emphasis on microcosm and close observation; the first person perspective, with its easy intimacy, its feeling of authenticity; and the allusion to something bigger from something small, the finding of the universal in the particular (which I hope isn’t done pretentiously or in a way that hits the reader over the head, but rather lets her take or leave, as she wishes.) In this case, think about the "toughening" and the "sweetening" that come out of adversity, and how this calls back to the old man's hand.

And something else of which I’ve lately been rather guilty:  an unseemly dose of nostalgia, a lot of poignant references to childhood! (So if I’ve ever tossed a rotten crap apple at your passing car, my sincere apologies!)