Poem-granate
by Farren Stanley
When the knife split back the pomegranate's
dull leather and perfect
intact compartments, the practical cloistered
cells of honeybees, nests for those
hexagonal jewels--
O florid astonishment! After a week-long
confinement on the filthy counter,
puff of blue foodsmoke,
the surge of horror:
Grief! Squandered abundance!
It beckoned from behind the toaster,
Split this open and see
what you've left to spoil—
O, love song for low globe of sex fruit,
for lovers reunited in the barest nights of the year!
An early mouthful, filched before
supper was off the stove because of
the accidental triumph of fruit
left to ripen, not rot,
and its royal taste:
the expected sweetness, the allusion to
tannin that wilts into chalk, a sensate contralto
dying on the tongue all black
smoke and crimson scarves.
Later, making slow deliberate work of the
fruit, I learn things.
Some people, mouths a vacuum
to strip sweet from seed,
will swallow the pith's bulk.
Fingers drawn through
a sticky mound on the collection plate
I think of their ballast,
a quarry in the belly.