Mulberry

Despite millennia jammed with the impossible
silk of aroma, intellection's saffron, the grilled
cocoon of feeling, not to mention Psyche, Muse, Id,
Satori, Melancholy, Eros, Eros, Eros,
or the bottomless agony this poem will
not praise or bemoan or so much as wince at beyond
this line, I offer mulberry, mulberry pure
as idea and mulberry dense by the dozen
in a blue tureen big as a soccer ball halved,
thick bowl glazed blue as mulberries mounded blue-black
as Andalucían sky the moment before
final black comes, and when it comes (mulberry-inked
memory, mulberry equipoise not sweet nor sour),
it bursts between tongue and palate, thirst at once made
and gratified, lamplit night-nectar sluicing down throats,
mulberries hilled on hand-churned ice cream, mulberries
spreading dusk on dabbling fingers, swabbing fat tongues,
speckling noses and eyelids and cheeks and nothing
exists, exists, nothing the mulberry sublime.

Copyright © 2004 John Repp All rights reserved
from The Fertile Crescent
Cherry Grove Collections
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission