Now, Now

Annunciation with Possum and Tomatoes

37 Annunciation with Possum and Tomatoes Faith, in spring, is a fertile bed, the hope of things unseen—summer, round in the hand; toil, expectancy, ripe weight. Grace, for a possum, is another thing: a sleeping dog, an open gate, nine soft globes, each bite, a new beginning. She ate them all, but afterward I dreamed I saw a jungle of tomatoes grown wild against the house, the fruit hanging fat, allegorical, as the red canopy in Dieric Bouts’s Annunciation, in which the Virgin, surprised in her bedchamber, looks up from her book, as the Flemish angel, plain and reliable as a school nurse, calmly delivers the news. His right finger points up at the Father, or at the tomato-shaped folds of the drapery, as he explains about the fruit of the womb, how it will ripen and spill to repair the blight in the garden, the one that begot death and beauty in turn, having first made thieves of us all. Bouts’s Holland would not taste tomatoes for another century; the plague was swallowing citizens left and right, but the good people of Haarlem still donned their peasant leggings and took to the field. Perhaps the ploughman, framed moments ago in the Gothic arch of the Virgin’s window, has set down his rake and is resting in the shade of a tree, 38 thinking about the fall and its hungers, and about himself, kin to all mortal creatures, the ones who sow, and the ones who plunder after them, who wake famished in the night, all furred appetite, dreaming of a fruit they have never known: flesh and seed, crotch and vine, its taste in the mouth sharp as the known world, delectable as Eden. ...