Somewhere Not Here

May 22 2019

It is strawberry season

somewhere not here,

because it is always spring

somewhere in the world.

So the supermarket shelves

are spilling over

with luscious red fruit,

tiers of clear plastic clamshells

like some neat cornucopia

of only one sort.

Looking forbidden

libidinous

ripe.

And filling the aisles

with an intoxicating smell

that draws us in like fruit flies,

that cloying scent

with its elusive notes

of rain-rinsed freshness.

The boom and bust of fruit;

a glut of cheap strawberries

that look like they're on steroids,

as red as sex

and ornamented

with crowns of bright green leaves.

Primary colours

that shock the eye.

They grow wild, here

in clement patches

in sheltered scrub

in our short intense summer,

that one fecund month

of long hot days.

A place we keep to ourselves;

like a precious secret

among intimate friends.

A modest fruit

that rarely fully ripens

before forest creatures strip them clean.

While supermarket fruit

is almost obscene

in its excess;

so succulent, voluptuous

luridly red,

turgid

with sweet and sticky juice.

And the cardboard taste

that disappoints

beneath the gloss.

As will most of our desires.

The seductive promise

of the things we chased

we learn too late

was false.

I sat down to write a poem about religion, and the human impulse for surrender, security, belonging: the comfort of fatalism, the delusion of certainty, the longing for community that religion can fill. How we seek this out. And how even I, with my skepticism, Vulcan rationality, and preference for solitude am also susceptible. But I wasn't really comfortable with this: too philosophical to do justice in poetry, and probably too confessional for my comfort if I was to write the way I wanted, which is to be both personal and particular.

So inspiration came instead from a quick glance at the small plate beside me, as I sat with pen in hand, nibbling on strawberries: an unseasonably cold wet day, toward the end of May, when the last sheltered remnant of snow still persisted in the shade of a row of cedars. How odd, then, to find the supermarket shelves suddenly overflowing with this delicate fruit, and at such unreasonably low prices. It struck me how out of season this seemed. And then how immaterial seasonality has become, in a globalized society of industrial agriculture.

So I wrote this poem instead. Poems always work better, it seems, the smaller they are. How much better to focus in a single piece of fruit than on the great existential and metaphysical conundrums that can never really be solved, and hurt your head to think about.

(The fruit, btw, was both organic and delicious. I would recommend never buying the non-organic type, because strawberries in particular require heavy doses of pesticides and herbicides. And, as the poem says, they almost always have no taste or texture; even the beautifully red ones can be cardboard. I should also note that a recent New Yorker had a fascinating piece about the stoop labour involved in harvesting strawberries, as well as the search for a machine that can replace this shrinking work force. Here's a link:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/15/the-age-of-robot-farmers )