The yellow squash plants are beginning to show the first signs of succumbing to winter. It begins as a small vegetable mold on the roof eventually coats the whole plant. Amid the new buds, one yellow summer squash shaped like a perfectly inverted bell.
Acrid squash odor, crushed umbilicus. Pale white streaks among the overwhelming yellow, brighter and glossier than a lemon or an apple. Yellow, pure cadmium from the tube, so intense, it pushes the green garden air away with small vibrations of life. I want to ask it, why so yellow? The jealous sun takes its warm from the south, or are you kin to the summer sun? Small reminders of summer.
Those vessels of light burn against the cooling soil, those furry leaves glisten with snail tracks prisms for the sun. Pale green stems against yellow orange blossoms curling their five arms around the fruiting body like fingers, or brain coral as it rises up, so phallic. The base root swelling and bursting through the boundaries of the star shaped bell, until it becomes crenelated like the sunset over the sea.
Green veins end in small claws. One set at the tip of the star-shaped flower, the other at the base, like two hands. One holding up the sky, the other holding up the sun as if from victory like a tiger without stripes, a coat of fine hair velvets the soft throat of the flower.
I remember picking the ones unpollinated, my grandmother taking the small egg suns dipped in flour pollen, frying them in butter like dinosaur tracks of the sun feeding me in late summer.
Long French curve of young leaves wrapped around embryonic clusters, diamond shaped, small flying saucers on launchpads. Large leaves jagged green hearts. Umbilicus, a small green eye, a rusted navel where the flower once raised its victorious hands towards the sun. Pointing in radical asymmetry in the direction away from the center. This extravagance of life too soon dies.
In the heat of summer, you can almost hear them growing, taught-skinned, ripening and bursting with seed—genetic code to carry them through winter. Small blind eyes in the soil waiting for the signal to begin.
The kitchen knife reveals their hidden star charts, the marrow and veins of space. Seeds sliced in half like a photographer’s negative of the night sky. Stars align in the direction of orbit.
These blossoms, bell-shaped, wine cups to drink the sun from, or knobby flying saucers severed by a knife. You rejoin the halves but the breach within your venous dealings but you can’t bridge the tension released by the knife, all that round symmetry released from a circular chamber discovers the straight edge and can never go back to that innocent immortal promise of eternity so lightly taken in summer’s mounting passion.
Green veins end in small claws. One set at the tip of the star-shaped flower, the other at the base, like two hands. One holding up the sky, the other holding up the sun as if from victory like a tiger without stripes, a coat of fine hair velvets the soft throat of the flower.
I remember picking the ones unpollinated, my grandmother taking the small egg suns dipped in flour pollen, frying them in butter like dinosaur tracks of the sun feeding me in late summer.
Long French curve of young leaves wrapped around embryonic clusters, diamond shaped, small flying saucers on launchpads. Large leaves jagged green hearts. Umbilicus, a small green eye, a rusted navel where the flower once raised its victorious hands towards the sun. Pointing in radical asymmetry in the direction away from the center. This extravagance of life too soon dies.
In the heat of summer, you can almost hear them growing, taught-skinned, ripening and bursting with seed—genetic code to carry them through winter. Small blind eyes in the soil waiting for the signal to begin.
The kitchen knife reveals their hidden star charts, the marrow and veins of space. Seeds sliced in half like a photographer’s negative of the night sky. Stars align in the direction of orbit.
These blossoms, bell-shaped, wine cups to drink the sun from, or knobby flying saucers severed by a knife. You rejoin the halves but the breach within your venous dealings but you can’t bridge the tension released by the knife, all that round symmetry released from a circular chamber discovers the straight edge and can never go back to that innocent immortal promise of eternity so lightly taken in summer’s mounting passion.
11/6/88
this eventually becomes
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