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[penguinboy.livejournal.com]

Pomegranate

How charitable to call it fruit, when almost nothing
inside it can be eaten. Just the gelatin
that thinly rinds the unpalatable seed.
The rest of it all pith, all bitter,
hardly a meal, even for a thin girl. But enough,

at least in the myth, to be what ties Persephone
half the year to hell. From thenceforward her name
makes the corn stalks wither: that’s why
the Greeks called her Kore,
just Kore, meaning the girl or the maid, the one

who because she was hungry stood no chance against even
the meager pomegranate—though it’s never clear
this future isn’t the one she wants,
her other choice being daylight, sure,
but also living with her mother. In some versions

she willingly eats the plush red seeds, signing on
with the underground gods and their motorbikes
and their dark shades. Oh . . . all right—
no motorbikes. And eat’s not right either.
But what, then, “sucks”? “Strains the seeds against her teeth”?

Of course it would have made more sense for Hades to tempt her
with something full of juice: a grapefruit, say,
or a peach. But maybe these
would be too close to her mother’s food.
And only a girl like Eve could be so blank a slate

to ruin herself with a meal as salutary as the apple.
Give her instead the kind of nourishment
that takes its own hydraulics to extract,
like the pomegranate, or the spiny
asteroid of the Chinese chestnut. Or the oyster,

from which, between the riffled shell and shucking knife,
there is no exciting unscathed: a delicacy, we say,
whenever the hand hangs out its little
flag of broken skin.
But doesn’t the blood that salts the mouth

somehow make the meat taste sweeter? As when she turns
toward us in the moonlight with the red pulp
mottling her teeth: don’t our innards
—even if to spite us—start to sing?
I know that’s what mine did on those nights

when our girl got called out of the junipers
where the rest of us hid her—all it took was his
deep voice, and she stepped out.
Then came sounds that, instead of meaning
carried all of punctuation’s weight: the exclamation

when she had her air knocked out, and the question
that was her sudden, inswept breath.
And the parentheses when time went on forever,
when there was no sound because he’d got her by the throat.
He seemed to like our watching, his imperiousness

saying books about how much we didn’t know: the jelly
sluiced inside the mouth or the seeds rasped
back and forth across the palate,
until it came time for her to hide behind her own hand
when she had to tongue them out. Sometimes

it would end when the boyfriend strolled her off,
steering as if she were the boat and her skinny arm
were its tiller. But just as often
he’d have somewhere to get to, or lose interest
as if so much activity had pushed him to the brink of sleep,

and that’s how she came back to us kneeling
in our moonlit patch of stunted trees
whose evergreenery wove our hair and pressed
its crewelwork in our haunches. In the half-dark
it would be hard to make out what he’d done: lip pearled,

her chin gleaming like the hemisphere of a tarnished spoon.
But didn’t the leaves seem brighter then,
if it can be said that junipers have leaves?
As our hard panting rattled through
. . . but no. Stop here. No of course it can’t be said.

by Lucia Perillo

Comments

[miadzin.livejournal.com]

Nice.