A Happiness of Plums

Even to say "plum" is delightful, and apparently I am not the only one to think such silly thoughts. For one, Helen Chasin has an entire poem devoted to "The Word Plum":

"The word PLUM is delicious

pout and push, luxury of
self-love, and savoring murmur

full in the mouth and falling
like fruit

taut skin
pierced, bitten, provoked into
juice, and tart flesh

question
and reply, lip and tongue
of pleasure."

And just this last week Andrews English Chair Douglas Jones commented in class that he loved Ezra Pound's choice of words in "The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter" when he ends one of the poem's lines with "blue plums."

But "plum" is also a bluish purple thought that wants to tumble me out of a plum tree back into Langdon, NH-- a child light enough that I don't squash any of the fruits I land on beneath our neighbor's little stand of trees--to scuffle around in the cold autumn grass with our German-Shepherd-Husky Duke, before he had cancer, and to gobble up the plums my mum tried to save from the bellies of my siblings, cousins, and I.

And it is the color of jam in that little book from the Shed Porter Memorial Library in which the family has so many plums and so much plum jam that they become round with its sugars, and fix their floor tiles with it, and dream about it, and are ruled by a purple stickiness. I don't think that it would scare me anymore.

Even now they are looking at me--juicy, plump, and bursting with their tender fibers, waiting for me to follow them back to the little story my Aunt Jean wrote about a little girl named Emily collecting plums with her brother and sister, putting them in a box, and taking them home to stew on the stove and stir with a long wooden spoon.

But instead I can only place their cool selves in my hand and eat them at mealtimes and othertimes, telling them that another day I might have the time to hold tight to their little stems and allow them to roll me back into the stories they come from...

Right now I only have the time for their happiness.