These are my pretty, pretty blackberries.In the evening (after first stopping at the Scottish Festival in Payson, where one of the Festival rules was that all swords were to remained sheathed throughout the Festival. Really. I found it in writing), I made a blackberry and apricot free form tart with a cornmeal crust. Delicious.
I always think of this poem when I eat blackberries.
MEDITATIONS AT LAGUNITAS
by Robert Hass
All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.
6 comments:
I need to get myself up to the SLC Farmer's Market very, very soon.
that is one of those poems that i literally can't read. the words are too dense. i honestly could not get past the first line. i think it's some kind of dyslexias. i tried three times. i is dumb i guess.
Yes you should, Yankee Girl. It is very fine.
Rebekah--It is a particularly dense poem. Maybe you should skip down to the end. That part reads much more easily (and includes the blackberriness).
That's a beautiful poem. I wish I were better acquainted with poetry, but becoming acquainted with a poet seems to take more effort for me (maybe more thinking?) than getting to know a novelist.
Poetry's tricky. Most of the poems and poets I love best have been introduced to me by other people or in classes. I agree that it's easier to pick up novels and feel at ease than it is for me to get a grasp on a new poet and his/her work.
Those blackberries look really yummy! We have some little bushes in the back but they aren't really producing yet (just a handful).
Did you enjoy the Payson Scottish Festival? You should add a link to their website (www.PaysonScottishFestival.org) so that more people can check it out.
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