taste

Eager, over the kitchen sink I pry apart pawpaw fruit, lay the seeds one by one on the counter
which has been a garish yellow longer than I've been alive
Never alone, in the next room a podcast plays: the paris review
Before podcasts there was the radio: voices from afar, voices filling in for the ancestors,
filling in for the community who might have lived nearby, might have but never has
might have, in another time or way of being
I've been frantic to rescue the pawpaws from the city
who are like death, but malevolent, like death but ugly, like death but a force from without
like death but not of it
like death in that they are destroyers, like death in that they may arrive without warning
but unlike death in that they may be resisted
or so I like to play
for while I turn soil and tend trees, build hills and drainage ditches, prepare the land for a time when I and all the neighborhood ar egone, dead, too afraid to squat here any longer, disinterested at last with preventing this place from breathing
for that time
prepare the land here
to remember itself

Eager I pry apart pawpaw fruit, small, firm, fallen, found beneath the trunks unripe and spotted
I cut into it
                       
            for the first time
        a thing which has been an idea
becomes small
between my hands and my knife

       when all the fruit is dismantled
 all the seeds but one laid on the peeling laminate
         that one seed sliced through
   in one stroke
 by  the hand of a child with a man's arm
    too strong, too clumsy
little wrecking balls
   
little worms

I regard the carnage
three fruits in bits
lean down
bring tenderly a segment to my lips smell it bite it with my front teeth a little piece

I
have
never
had  this in my mouth before
                                                         devourer
                                                         discoverer
                                                       
we really don't know anything
but those things we put in our mouth
move there
feel there
taste, smell, press in and out

bit of unripe fruit and I
have had our moment

in the afterglow I stand at the door
a metal screen pretending to separate one world from another
weave of maya
I see in the miasma of browns and greens a moving orange black
make it a butterfly                                                                  someone is speaking
make the butterfly my brother                                               wallace shawn
also new                                                                                or sadie stein
clumsy                                                                                  a clip of kerouac
wandering among moments and new things
testing them
with its mouth