Fat Jersey Blues

Blueberry (or “Another Summer-of-1975 Poem”)

13 Blueberry (or “Another Summer-of-1975 Poem”) The chains that bind us most closely are the ones we have broken. —Antonio Porchia Gather with me in the kitchen where the floorboards sag & squeak & Star’s marbles veer toward the northern corner unless you put some serious oomph into your thumb. Say blueberry. Say it sound by sound. Cathy sits at the kitchen table with a friend. Neither wears anything beneath her muslin blouse. The helicopters have lifted off the embassy roof. The house was built in the 1740s. Dave & I have driven into the tidal flats in his father’s Willys. We ran out of gas near Bridgeton. Read Kinnell’s “Blackberry Eating” then my “Mulberry” then finish this. Cathy & I will soon dunk in the Maurice River, our cutoffs, my Pegasus t-shirt & her just-loose-enough blouse tossed on the bank. Stand where I stand & you’ll glimpse the friend’s puckered left nipple. You’ll think, as I do, If it does that when it’s this hot, winter should be interesting. For five minutes, say every word you think. Notice what your mouth does. The floorboards are twelve to fourteen inches wide. Some of the nail heads are big as the smallest of Star’s marbles. I no longer work at the egg auction, but Nate does. He still talks about Auschwitz, but only after his lunchtime schnapps. Blueberry. Mary spices the pork roast on the drain board. The seedlings I’ve forced for six weeks with liquid fertilizer & two fluorescents in a closet lined with aluminum foil sit crammed between the Willys’ front seat & back gate. The satellites that let us see the helicopters lift off the embassy roof didn’t exist ten years ago. buhhhhllllloooooo. Cathy & the friend talk astrology. What are you? 14 Dave & I don’t know, so they tell us they can tell just by looking, which they do & we check & they’re right. We say Wow, elongating the ow. My mother’s hair has turned silver. Gemini hasn’t been a space capsule for eight years. Reading Kesey might help. Richard Fariña. Alan Watts before he got famous. Ram Dass, who goes without saying. Luckily, Dave’s father keeps a topped-off gas can behind the Willys’ front seat. My grandmother still roasts the world’s best chicken. George & Mike still work at the egg auction. My mother has just turned fifty, which means inch-long hair, swollen joints & a mania to make amends. Mary beckons to Star, who skips in from the mud room. Let’s shuck this corn & they do. Dave & I listened to Paradise & Lunch as we packed the seedlings in the ice-cream-cone boxes a nymph named Maria stacked for me outside the back door of Verona Custard. buhhherrrrreeee. George only laughs when you ask about Vietnam. Mike catalogs the dope, ordnance & women (girls, really, as he always confides) in descending order of power & enough detail to fuel reverie & nightmare that seem like neither. Mary’s Dave comes out of the bathroom in a towel. As soon as he’s dressed, we’ll head to the secret field. Low-tide funk sweetens the kitchen. My grandmother still makes the best peach pie in history. She worked twenty hours a day between 1935 & 1941. Pine Barrens blueberries, the smaller the sweeter, must be tasted to be believed. Go northwest of Hammonton, past the cranberry bogs. My mother has never forgiven the Jews who stiffed her at the Dells resort. They had the table manners of five-year-olds. She smiled & smiled & got zero, but then, nobody ever gave her anything. My father either. My grandfathers, grandmothers, aunts & uncles either. Me? I’ve been given everything & I mean that. Taste the peaches south of the Black Horse Pike. Taste everything till no taste remains. The seeds that became the forced seedlings Dave & Dave & I 15 will plant in the secret field rolled down the inner crease of Arthur (Or the Decline & Fall of the British Empire) into the ceramic bowl Joni bought at an old-timey music festival in West Virginia & gave me because it was the right time to give me that particular bowl, but also because I listened so well & long into a hot night exactly one June ago to the tale of the baby she gave up for adoption the spring of her eighth-grade year. My grandmother still talks about piecework on the Lower East Side, her friend Boyd, the El. Notice what your mouth does with peach. With Achilles. With sleep. At the...