All the new poems are about blackberries.
But to praise the blueberry
is to praise the ordinary and easily obtained
pleasures of this world,
spartan gems
in green plastic baskets,
summer’s common caviar, rank-and-file
pie-fillers, foot soldiers
sprung from hardscrabble soil
bearing bandoliers of edible bullets
from Skowhegan, Maine,
to Abbotsford, British Columbia.
Even in New Jersey,
industrial mother of cities and great poets,
choleric and densely arteried,
even along the tea-colored rivers
east of Camden they thrive,
five-pointed “star berry”
beloved of the indigenous peoples,
native forage of the black bear
and sprightly deer
as numerous now as when the colonizers
first appeared in those
marshy bays and estuaries
lined with cattails and summer homes.
Despite which history
there is no national hymn to the blueberry,
no Whitmaniacal encomium,
no mythos,
no pantheon or canon.
Blueberries inhabit the uncultivated
margins of our imagination,
easily overshadowed
by the succulence of strawberries,
overawed by the patriotic
stature of the apple, the exotic
individualism of coconut and kiwi,
against which they project
the bland,
antiheroic identity
of the collective, entirely pluralistic,
a democracy of spheres,
the sour purple pea-sized berries
and the bitter green
beadlings and the ordinary citizens
in crisp blue tunics
fattening with sugar week by week
as the season swells to perfect ripeness.
And then declines.
Summer passes. Blueberries disappear
unremarked from our midst
as autumn’s grasping hand grows skeletal,
and the first snow settles
upon drifted oak and maple leaves.
And if, in their early winter rambles,
they were to happen upon that
brittle, fine-branched, pale-leaved bush,
they might mistake it for
forsythia,
more likely they would not
pay it any mind
at all, those
eager American poets
traveling ever deeper into the forest
in pursuit of the legendary,
labyrinthine,
bramble-tangled temple
of the blackberry.
Tell me, which is it
they have come to adore,
the fruit
or the thorns?