Fruit-bearing Things

writing about the birds (again), a new playlist, "Liars" and the best book i've read this year

Apple Trees in Bloom at Giverny, Claude Monet

Fruit-bearing Things

Some days, if I press my cheek against the wooden fence just right—the world reduced to the pain of a sliver—I can slip my mind into my neighbor's backyard, green and verdant, nothing but wild weeds and fruit-bearing things. Amid the bright yellows and bruised-pinks, it’s the color of the persimmons that strikes me the most, their flesh dipped again and again, making something much darker than what memory tells us could be orange at all.

Some mornings, while I tend something hot and mindless at the stove, I hear the warning hum of a mower, so I know someone else visits the field like I do, but they always leave the fruit untended, as if ripeness was never related to readiness at all.

Other mornings, while I fumble over sentences at the computer, I hear the birds arrive in flocks of clever words—a murder, a murmuration, a charm, a brace. It’s an unusual commotion, their song, and so I walk outside to watch them as they pull fruit flesh from the boughs in concert.

I want to warn them, to tell them that rot starts within. But they come back again and again, rounded globes of flesh in their mouths like lanterns of celebration. Rotten or simply forgotten; I guess it depends on how you look at it. Perhaps birds are the same as us; perhaps they never learn to savor joy, but gorge on one gloppy mouthful at a time.