What, this Old Thing?

Best I can tell, I started writing this poem in 1998.  On my first ever flash drive, I've got a file 24 pages long, dedicated to three poems.  This one by far, has the most versions--page upon page of highlighted, underscored, italicized, edited lines. I went at it again in 2002 and once more in 2006 but the dratted thing never felt finished.  Even as I cut and pasted it here, I deleted words, added a phrase...

I refuse though, to consign it to flash-drive-oblivion because I so love what inspired it.  In case you can't guess, it encompasses a memory that rises each summer, when I take a trip to the blueberry farm next to a man-made pond in the town next door--which gives me great pleasure and loads of fat berries, but fails to recreate the depth of certain childhood experiences.  At least once a summer, my sisters Sarah or Connie or my friend Martha and I rowed across a lake to bushes that drooped heavy with berries at the edge of dense woods lining a far shore.  We usually came home with a small tin, half full--enough to make one small Blueberry Buckle.  That's it.  Perhaps it was all the work, for such a smidgen of delicious reward, that sealed this memory in my heart.

If you ever get a chance to pick native blueberries verses the cultivated variety, take it.  Native plants are sparse and low to the ground, the fruit tiny; it takes ages to fill a tin.  But each petite morsel offers an explosion of taste, like a good poem, where every word adds punch and value.  I rarely attempt poetry much anymore, but once in a while, like picking indigenous berries, the effort to seek out, pare down and refine ripe words, provides a rewarding exercise.

Lake Waban Gatherings

Rowing from
this seamless beach,
weaving circles
through the warp
and weft of
black-water
tapestries,
we glide to an
embroidered cove,
where blueberries
hanging from
green leaf threads,
stain our fingers,
purple our tongues—
and knit us
into patterns
sewn
of vintage summers.