Two poems (and not even one title between them)

The heart is rich of its own imagination—
that of the gardener who, looking
through seed catalogues in January, can already
taste the summer’s fresh peas. Up on the top
floor, the skull’s brand of imagination
is concerned with schedules and supplies,
matters temporal and spatial, whatever it is
in dreams that is quantifiable. Not so
the heart, that red muscle, that fluttering sparrow—
it sends out whispers and shivers that ripple
beneath the skin, it labours at feeding the senses,
as though it were the only living thing
to have heeded the commandment:
o taste and see


***



As sure as weeds, come summer’s end,
come the blackberries, and then—
the blackberry jam, then the poems
about blackberries.

Things we wish for: that summer wouldn’t
curl and shrink, then blow away.
That we could pick every last blasted
berry on the bush, and damn the barbs
and scars.

That things would last as long
as we think we need them for.

Hence, the boiling black, the sweetness
spread on good bread on a dreary November
morning. Hence, one more poem

about ripeness, about plenty,
about the wide, golden curve
before darkness.