Intro to an Untitled Poem
A few months ago, I made loquat jam for the first time. I have written about our loquat tree and an unfortunate incident in which it was run over.
Considering what the small tree has been through, it’s remarkable to me that it is once more bearing fruit. And not just a little fruit; several times while the little golden fruits were thick on the tree, passersby asked if they could have some.
Some didn’t ask, like the birds who enjoyed especially those fruits at the top of the tree where I couldn’t quite reach.
But the problem with the loquats, at least this spring, is that they all ripened at once. I needed to do something before they shriveled up on the tree.
That something was making jam.
The jam has been long consumed, but I thought of it during a recent FB Messenger conversation with my older brother, an artist in Portland.
Afterward, I started writing a poem.
[Untitled]
My brother speaks of preserving
fruit from blackberry bushes
profuse in the Pacific Northwest.
Europeans brought the sprawling
bushes you see in your mind’s eye
though some blackberries native
to the Americas grow along the ground
harder to glean yet I imagine sweeter
somehow. At his mention of canning
huckleberries in season, tomatoes
sun-ripened and roasted, I tell him
of my singular experience preserving
loquats. It took all morning
plucking them ripe and gold
from the tree, deseeding boiling blending.
Rarely have I felt so present
as if somehow I might
also pluck the secret of the universe
from that selfsame tree
but two point five pounds
of fruit boiled down to not quite
two small jars of loquat jam.
A single seed has borne
far more than one hundred
fold, yet work remains
—the labor of plucking gold
and making of it something
somehow sweeter and enough
for those who hunger, like me
for more than daily bread.
I had never heard of a loquat before reading your post today, so thank you for educating me! I have an apple tree that decided to produce an insane amount of fruit this year, so I too have spent much time processing the fruit to make goodies (applesauce, apple crisp, apple bars, apple butter, etc). I have harvested two 5-gallon buckets so far, and still have at least one bucket to go!
I very much enjoyed reading your experience as well as your poem. Keep following your creative passions!
The window of an old office I had on the second floor opened up to where the fruits were hanging. In August, I’m always reminded of the fruits it bears…