Mulberries, and: The Old Lady Tour
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Mulberries
For breakfast I go out and eat mulberries straight from the tree. I cram them into my hungry watering mouth,
so succulent sweet, crunch of their star seeds between my teeth. If one could eat the infinite night sky, it would taste like plump mulberries.
They start out small, light green, almost white, swell to pink drupelets, then turn to blood clots, ripen
black. Plucked red, they’re tart. Pick them too late, and they’ve already begun to ferment. Dark sugars fester in my mouth. Festina lente,
make haste slowly, say the old Latin writers. Such sweet paradox, delicious to the tongue
as rain-swollen mulberries. Learn how to grow old and die from them. By tomorrow, some of the red berries will have turned to black
constellations I’ll reach for. The starlings will gorge on them, shit out mid mind-maddening zigzag flight [End Page 28]
their purple-splatter Rorschachs, a diarrhea diary on our white car’s roof and hood. I read my future in that screed. Festina lente. The world’s a festival
of lights. The coreopsis’s bright sunspots will wilt and black out slowly if summer brings
no withering drought on the red-winged blackbird’s quick apocalyptic wing. It flashes fire and night with each dark wing beat’s hammer stroke
and strike. Death, make haste slowly. Away let me idle this day. A white, two-seater plane
buzzes above me, banks, practices perfect circles, pollinates the cumulus clouds flowering the southeast horizon—pure white, hybrid peonies.
When I was young, an old poet told me that the proper subject of poetry was flowers. What a forty-pound sack
of horse manure, I thought. Now, I’m not so sure. Our hostas put forth green spikes whose tips erupt into creamy lavender clusters of florets,
summer’s erectile tissue. The backyard’s studded with clover, star field of weeds that take over
everything. Cool breeze sways the mulberry tree. I’m happy to waste my life on these words, so many indescribably sweet mulberries [End Page 29]
that I and the gossipy starlings can’t possibly consume them all. They fall to the ground where they too become black dirt.
The Old Lady Tour
Dana, my wife, used to drive her dad, Erwin, from his retirement community in Virginia Beach
to visit his two lifelong friends three hours away in Charlottesville. “The old lady tour” she calls it, as if Coco and Carter are landmarks,
bronze nonagenarian statues that the pigeons perch and shit upon in the city square, each with a tarnished
plaque identifying them, their dates, the exploits that made them famous under the dumbstruck sun now petrified to a standstill. Erwin’s dead. We still
make the rounds, do the old lady tour. Coco, who started out in independent living fifteen years ago,
just moved to a single room next to the solarium on the third floor of the nursing home. “The waiting for God floor” she likes to call it at ninety-four.
She launches into her monologue. How her good friend, who ended up a baroness, was “barren, [End Page 30]
no kids” and had gotten married three times. “The first marriage was for love, the second for money, the third for sex.” Coco too is childless. She shows us
photos of herself and her late husband Horace in front of their black Bentley in the early 1950s. She looks
like a movie star in her form-fitting, strapless, silver satin dress. Her now-thinning white hair, wild as Einstein’s, was then platinum blonde
and permed in synchronized waves. She and Horace, in his dove-gray morning suit, were “the cream
of Charlottesville’s horsey set.” She tells us how they built an ultra-modern house out in the country, mostly glass, with floor-to-ceiling windows,
against which the hounds when Horace went riding with their neighbors in the monthly fox hunt “would lift their legs”
as they went baying by, hot on the scent. Coco would have to go out and wash the windows. The couple to whom she sold the property
tore the...
