Phantastic Hope

Poems such as...

STRAWBERRIES

Foggy, vacant, the streets and buildings floated, loosed among dreams before first light. Walking to work I crossed routes with a hulking, bent-backed man, hair to his hips, dragging a gaggle of cans in a plastic sopping sack.

Just before New Years I saw him in Safeway’s side lot, where the chained dumpsters repose in a rust-bearded reek: he was standing head down, ponytail hanging, as if in deliberation. He cradled a small gray carton in his hands. With concentration so pure it was enviable he plucked one strawberry by its stem and bit into it.

I could taste the soil on the tiny hairs in its dimpled skin, the tang of the juice with its bitter edge at the berry’s white nub, the sugary heady center: jewel of the running weed, strawberry -- bringing you back, back to north central Washington, the first ripe night of summer.

I went into the store and no, no strawberries in December. When I came out I saw him still, small, walking under the parallel, narrowing lights of Tenth Street. As if he could sense me watching, from six, seven blocks away he turned once, bearing the little box against his belly with both hands.

I was twenty-three. Already I believed that everything is earned, that your labor accrues certain rights. As if everything – the first fruit – hadn’t been here before us. As if we had been possible, conceivable without provision.