It Is Not Always Possible to Fall in Love In Blackberry Season by Robin Behn

Oh, what a luscious, juicy, earthy, magnificent poem by Robin Behn!

Enjoy:

It Is Not Always Possible To Fall in Love in Blackberry Season

You might enter the many dark chambers
without this tender clustering,

you might start by washing your lover’s mouth in snow
or tease apart the spring tendril root of him,

or scrape the old leaves out of his autumn hair
on your way to making his acquaintance in loam,

but if it is chosen in the kingdom of blackberries
that you shall be one of the ones,

one of the many clusters of ones,
that among the thorns and giant snails

you and he shall wade the slimy,
primordial rocks of the creek

to get to the blackberries leaning over the current,
and if whoever sees one first

shall place it onto the waiting, snail-like
ravenous tongue of the other

and know the gift of
the other’s pleasure before he

dismantles with his gentlest caliper fingers
the next dark ripe one, leaving

the brightness for later,
the suck and give

of the pale, moist, naked, astonished stem-head
among the young screaming red ones for later

and place that next, that dark, that ripe one on your tongue
so that always, when you kiss, the explosion

of ankle-breaking cold and warm purple liquid earth
will alarm and comfort you

back to the beginning
of gathering everything in sight,

the ruin already in it, the bleeding
and the rot and plundering birds already in it,

a sharp, riotous darken-ness already in it, then

will you be ready
to lay your lives, together, down in thorns?

By Robin Behn