Transmission VIII

The Largest Blackberry You’ve Ever Seen

…

Summer’s when the things with thorns give birth.
Lemons, limes, and sour oranges —
around our house it’s blackberries galore.
Great big bushes skirt the clumps of trees
grown around the sinkholes that the farmers
never farmed, and only God can know
what’s down there in the earth, but the berries like it.
They’re large as fists, like clumps of grapes,
but darker, more mysterious in their ways,
and syrupy sweet as the stickiest summer nights
after the hottest hell-blessed summer days.
They get bigger every year, cross my heart —
that’s why the scientists don’t bother me
with all their talk about the planet dying.
Go ahead and turn the knob a bit,
and let Miami steam — it will only take
a single blackberry to make a cobbler
when all of this is said and done, and you know,
you’ve got to look for the good things in life.
Spring will grow the thorns, and June the fruit.
It’s summertime, and nothing can go wrong.