Writing about Obsessions

I'm a bit obsessive about fruit. I keep coming back for more. I’m often asked why I write poems about fruit—the strawberry, blueberry, apricot, apple, and others. This obsession with fruit is part of a larger obsession with food in general. Of course, it goes back to my childhood. I was a fussy eater whose father insisted that every plate be cleaned. I became adept at surreptitiously getting rid of what I could not bear to swallow. I made unnecessary trips to the bathroom to flush away wads of liver. I coughed asparagus into napkins. I stuffed my pockets with filet of sole. I plastered cottage ham under the dining room table. I risked danger. Food could get me in trouble.

In early adolescence I was a bit pudgy. The foods I loved—cake, cookies, candy, ice cream sundaes—were prohibited by my father who wanted me slender. My cravings only increased. I longed for something sweet and sticky. On the sly I consumed entire jars of Marshmallow Fluff.

I went to Sunday school, racking up eleven years of perfect attendance. That’s where I first met Eve and learned about the garden, the snake, and the apple. I must have filed all of that away for future use. Fruit, temptation, capitulation.

And then I saw the 1963 film, Tom Jones. I was mesmerized by that famous eating scene in which Tom and a buxom woman he meets at an inn sit at opposite ends of a long table and proceed to rip apart chicken legs and stuff their faces with juicy grapes, all the while gazing at each other with—yes!—seduction in their eyes. Food and sex. Of course! An extension of the apple.

I have been punished for my transgressions. Several years ago I developed a cranky stomach. Right at the top of the list of foods I could no longer eat—most of my favorite fruits. I only want them more. I am tantalized by their colors and aromas, their suggestive shapes, their various textures, the seeds, the skin. They are dangerous. They will make me suffer. I only want them more.

Writing about fruit is my way of getting what I want.

Organic Fruit

I want to sing
a song worthy of
the avocado, renegade
fruit, strict individualist, pear
gone crazy. Praise to its skin

like an armadillo’s, the refusal
to adulate beauty. Schmoo-shaped
and always face forward, it is what it
is. Kudos to its courage, its inherent love
of democracy. Hosannas for its motley coat,
neither black, brown, nor green, but purple-hued,
like a bruise. Unlike the obstreperous coconut, the

avocado yields to the knife, surrenders its hide of leather,
blade sliding under the skin and stripping the fruit. Praise
to its nakedness posed before me, homely, yellow-green,
and slippery, bottom-heavy like a woman in a Renoir, her
flesh soft velvet. I cup the fruit in my palm, slice and hold,
slice and hold, down to the stone at the core, firm fist at the
center. Pale peridot crescents slip out, like slivers of moon.
Exquisite moment of ripeness! a dash of salt, the first bite
squishes between tongue and palate, eases down my

throat, oozes vitamins and oil. Could anything be more
delicious, more digestible? Plaudits to its versatility,
yummy in Cobb salad, saucy in guacamole, boldly
stuffed with crabmeat. My avocado dangles from
a tree, lifts its puckered face to the sun, pulls
all that light inside. Praise it for being small,
misshapen, and durable. Praise it for
the largeness of its heart.

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