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5 Olives Sometimes a craving comes for salt, not sweet, For fruits that you can eat Only if pickled in a vat of tears— A rich and dark and indehiscent meat Clinging tightly to the pit—on spears Of toothpicks maybe, drowned beneath a tide Of vodka and vermouth, Rocking at the bottom of a wide, Shallow, long-stemmed glass, and gentrified, Or rustic, on a plate cracked like a tooth, A miscellany of the humble hues Eponymously drab— Brown greens and purple browns, the blacks and blues That chart the slow chromatics of a bruise— Washed down with swigs of barrel wine that stab The palate with pine-sharpness. They recall The harvest and its toil, The nets spread under silver trees that foil The blue glass of the heavens in the fall— Daylight packed in treasuries of oil, Paradigmatic summers that decline Like singular archaic nouns, the troops Of hours in retreat. These fruits are mine— Small bitter drupes Full of the golden past and cured in brine. ...

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