Tale of the Blueberries

I needed a cold book for the warm weather.

I met my friend at the coffee shop

by the music school. A student with a cello case

strapped to his back took a long, seemingly fretful time

to order a chamomile tea.

I had fallen in love with the past

tense, wishing I could always speak in it & end

most of my verbs with a firmness that felt

like clarity. But

that was no way to order an iced mocha.

I met my friend, who every time we met this spring

invited me to pick & eat blueberries

at his family’s farm, the place where he would be

helping out for much of the summer.

A part of me wanted to ask if the farm was in trouble,

if he had to reach out to all his writer friends

like this. But mainly I was glad to be invited,

over & over & today, too.

I knew I would be sad

if the next time he didn’t. & in truth I didn’t want to go

in case I embarrassed myself at the farm,

embarrassed my friend,

disrespected the blueberries,

& wasn’t invited back.

Definitely, I told him. I’d love to.

Then remembered how I’d said so last spring.

There was something in the way he asked

that sounded like he was talking about the past,

not the future, though of course

you could only invite someone to your future, including

conversations about your past.

I wouldn’t want anyone to actually visit

my past, to walk right into it like a coffee shop,

where the music playing is bad, where my mistakes are

just happening for however long they take & my present self

isn’t there to sigh, then say, Wait, please,

I’m about to make an apology, many

awkward yet sincere amends.

My family’s blueberry farm—it sounded like a setting

in a book, a warm book in which anything could happen

or a cold book in which only one thing must happen.

The student cellist was sitting across from us,

barely touching his tea.

I had fallen in love with the word eyelash.

I was reading a book where the writer was clearly in love

with the word eyelid.

I wanted to tell my friend in the coffee shop

all about this. I wanted to tell him I wanted to be friends

with this writer. I wanted to say I wanted to be better friends with him,

that I could see us being the kind of friends who told each other

what words we currently loved,

what words we once loved, we could be friends who told each other

we loved each other. But I hadn’t made it very far

in that book yet.