I picked a berry from a bush,
a wild blackberry it was, plump and full of juice.
So delicate it was!
I thought it would collapse
upon itself and be all marred;
and surely it was half marred already
(if it ever had been swollen, perfect,
before I touched it).
Its juice stained my fingers from a bruised place in the flesh:
more and more limp,
and lost the perfect dome,
and now half the tiny bulbs all wet and crushed.
At first at least
a potential magnificence,
thriving on its stem,
when, as soon touched,
as no eye could save it, the care folly
that tried to set it right.
Chagrinned, I ate it
to salve my disappointment.
Then I looked again at the bush
and the trees around it,
at the sky
and the clouds in the sky.
Nothing looked quite right,
so I wandered on.
Then it seemed to me that the whole world was a marred blackberry,
since the sky didn't look quite right,
not just not quite right, but not right at all;
and the blackberry
that I had eaten lay foul in the dirt,
the whole globe mashed,
and burst were all the tiny bulbs,
their sweet liquor brackish, mixed with loam,
the pink dome
becoming earth-rot, vanishing, vacuous:
And purified all expectation,
no mirror any longer for desire.
The blackberry was not,
and gone with it all swollen, bulbous blacks,
not into earth either, the earth too, the earth itself
vaporized, and gone all ammonia stench,
the methanes diffused away.
And not one sense remained to tell
that any fruit had ever been to pluck.
The emptiness then was like
a thrust up into broad air
after down stroke of arms,
a kicking back into a cloud,
a propulsion upon waste.
The disappearance of the blackberry was like
entering a thicket.
And I oozed through the insensate dark,
emerging into a clearing,
to a slightly new sky
and another blackberry bush.
about
1985
