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I was walking around the park two nights ago without any dessert so I started eating blackberries. It's the end of blackberry season and they don't look that great, but in the dark who can tell. I ate a handful on the way in and then again at the other side by the movie theatre. Then again shortly after the bridge on the way back I ate some more. But this time I had moved into the bush to gain access to those areas much less picked over. These berries were different, I thought as one melted on my tongue - just past ripeness a little fizz of alcohol and an intoxicating taste. Another tasted even better, way too soft for conventional picking, but in the cool night air just hard enough for me to pick properly. I continued to risk damage to my clothes and my bare legs as I went further, compulsively eating until Akira came to get me out of the bramble. Maybe it was the alcohol in the berries that got me thinking about writing this, taking photos and posting this poem which is such a greatly obvious bit of writing:

Blackberry Eating
Galway Kinnell

I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths or squinched,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry -- eating in late September.



aren't they beautiful?
see one more poem by Galway Kinnell