Blackberries

I threw away so many things after graduate school, certain that I had moved on. Sometimes, late at night, I’ll spend forty minutes trying to find things I’d written in the past, to see if there is anything to glean from them. But they were written by a stranger and in a landfill somewhere, filled with marginalia from people I used to know. It is fortuitous, I suppose, to have our words buried like that together. I do not think I could give them any greater honor than to be decomposing together, locked in the same argument for years.

I worked in the garden for seven hours on Saturday. I did not work in the garden for seven hour on Saturday. Sometimes, I would come inside and sip a cool glass of water. Or, I would be outside, pulling miniscule weeds, and I would wonder if I had drank enough water, if I was feeling light headed, if and when I’d get a sunburn, and I would go inside and drink a glass of water and stare at the computer for a few minutes until I remembered that it was more pleasurable to be in the garden than on the computer. I would go back outside and pull the miniscule weeds and feel pleased at all the sunshine.

I spent a good deal of time in the garden. Some of the time I drove to stores like Home Depot or Ace and bought mulch, and gardening gloves, and gravel, and I carried them around and felt hail and still relatively young and happy to be outside in the sunshine lifting bags and picking weeds and wondering if the weeds were in the bag of mulch, or whether they were naturally occurring and then wondering if it really mattered whether the weeds were in the mulch or in the ground underneath the mulch previously, because either way I was still going to have to pull them. The question mostly has to do with justice.

Many of the flowers from last year are now in bloom. The hydrangea lived, as did some cone flowers, irises, blue ice plants, etc. There is a small stretch of slightly sloping bark where I planted two dead sticks on the ground. I purchased them at Home Depot for eight dollars each, and I read the directions and then planted them. They had pictures of blackberries on the side of the box, and so I paid eight dollars for them. However, what they appeared to be that day, and what they still appear to be, is two dead sticks that someone picked up off their lawn and put in a box with a picture of blackberries on it. Sometimes, when I don’t remember the exact planting, I’ll convince myself that the dead sticks are turning themselves towards the sunlight. Then, I will look at them and realize that the two dead sticks have not moved all, because they are two dead sticks, and I will feel foolish, and wonder why I ever try anything at all. Why I even bother getting up to take a shower, and later, when there are blackberries growing from those two dead sticks I will think of this moment when I doubted them, and I imagine they will taste twice as sweet. Though that is unlikely given that they are dead.

Interpolation:

This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who says, Last night,
... the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?

(Eleanor Lerman, 1952 - )

Is life a series of interpolations interrupted by continuity? Or is life a continuous narrative interrupted by interpolations? When I was a child we gathered blackberries in our backyard from an overgrown bush that dropped their plumpest and juiciest bits into our yard. I can still remember the succulence of them as we ate them during late summer evenings, the taste so piercing that you could see how one might leave a garden for a bite of such things. I miss them so much. Every blackberry I’ve  had since we left that house has been a phantom, a shade, a blackberry in name only.

Earlier tonight, for no apparent reason, the word quotient appeared, as if out of thin air. And yet, I could not remember what quotient meant. Something to do with addition and then tangent was there too. I was thinking then about lines or angles, or the relationship between lines. And then I stopped wondering about lines and angles thinking now of all the other things that have passed through my mind and have now been lost or buried by the years.

By John Berger

What reconciles me to my own death more than anything else is the image of a place: a place where your bones and mine are buried, thrown, uncovered, together. They are strewn there pell-mell. One of your ribs leans against my skull. A metecarpal of my left hand lies inside your pelvis. (Against my broken ribs, your breast like a flower.) The hundred bones of our feet are scattered like gravel. It is strange that this image of our proximity, concerning as it does mere phosphate of calcium, should bestow a sense of peace. Yet it does. With you I can imagine a place where to be phosphate of calcium is enough.

I want, I want, I want, I want. Every time I start writing something I’m tempted to start with, I want. And yet, I know this is a superficial want, a desire incapable of being fulfilled, and yet I want still. What I want now is for those dead sticks to turn into blackberry bushes. I want them to turn into vines that reach up into the vault of the sky. I want to climb them after midnight, to sit amongst the stars and read poems to all that dead light. You see, wanting is a terrible thing as this is unlikely to happen. Instead, I should want them to remain as dead sticks, soldiering on, occasionally fooling me after a brisk wind into thinking they are turning toward the son.

Interpolation:

This song. The line that I love is about frozen strawberries, which are not blackberries. But I am willing to forgive them this indiscretion for the feeling of symbiosis that it brings me to hear of frozen strawberries and think of plums in the icebox and blackberries in the yard.