Al Fresco

“It’s hard to say, for sure,” he said,

and he bit into a fresh tomato.

He wasn’t rushing his answer –

but neither was I. 

The silence was without the awkwardness

that comes between two people

who premeditate the course

of a conversation.

We were both relaxed

into our meal

and into who we were.

I suppose I liked him

because I didn’t have to pose

for him. 

Even this picnic was able to be

a snatch-out-of-the-fridge thing,

no ostentatious candelabra,

just wine drunk from the bottle

and an off-the-cuff openness

that moved gracefully

around the afternoon hours

and drew snug.

“But actually . . . I think I would.”

As he leaned over and kissed me

I tasted the bitterness

of tomato skin

on his lips.

Reaping

The honeycomb bulbs of raspberries

freckle the garden below my window.

I would indulge my longing

to go out and pluck them,

let them shine on my tongue –

but mine is a separate craving.

I come to my dusty roof-frame,

my hot-house,

to glean my hand-tinkered plantings,

to reap abstractions from my inner vine.

As I stand, sweating, staring through

the hair-like brown horseshoes,

the fossils of raindrops on the brittle window,

I ask myself, “Why till these words,

these rinds of thoughts? 

Why go and carve them

like pumpkins, with no seeds to munch?”

It is because I have

a loud dog-mouthed hunger,

too wide a maw for raspberries,

and I want to find out

what this  barking is inside,

I want to find out

how to open this pea-pod.