- Free Article: No
- Contents Category: Poem
- Review Article: Yes
- Article Title: Mulberries and the Death of the Literary Novel
- Online Only: No
- Custom Highlight Text:
Torrid noon, I’m high in my mulberry harvest.
So, what is it with this tree? Lower branches, I click
quickly left or right – fingers safebreaker light
on the gorged capsules, and they detach,
drop, thuk and whole into my plastic bucket.
Yet from the tree-peak where the fattest fruit
clusters against the sun, O I must pinch
and wrest until the berries burst like bloodspray.
And now I’m being told the novel’s dead again.
My colleagues turn to murder. Here’s one
whose fastidious smile I knew when we were undergrads.
After years of sensibility he plans, for openers,
to flay a man alive. He’s done the research.
On blazing days when mulberries explode
the juice is exactly the heat of human blood.
So the novel’s dead and flop goes my vocation.
Could I flay a fellow to make ends meet
and get away untainted? Mulberry juice
runs warmly on my hands, under my watchband
into my armpits. I descend my tree,
my writing fingers crimsoned with the first degree.
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