Black Walnut
Tonight I arrange on my table six apricot halves
with a nugget of walnut on each open center.
Then place alongside, dates whose hollows I fill
with whole almonds. I begin to eat them
without ceremony, having considered each apricot
given its gold, its tenderness.
The glossy black dates need nothing, yet I want
them to cover the defiant husks of the almonds
hiding their milky flesh, which some people bare
by blanching in boiling water. The body
of the almond will split straight through
if left carelessly in the heat.
As for the walnuts, I don’t have the usual
cultivated variety, meatless and blond
and meant to be beautiful, but the country-grown
black walnuts that feed on the packed red dirt of the South.
When people there feel a certain heartsickness
they go out in secret and eat that clay
to cure the hunger of grief. This is why
the tree grows with a quiver in the wood,
tightly grained under the meager canopy of leaves.
And the fist of each nut, revealed in its pulp,
will open only to a hammer’s beat. The tooth
must spare nothing as it bears down,
righteously taking whatever it needs
to leave the hunger behind.
CLEOPATRA MATHIS was born and raised in Louisiana, and has lived in New England since 1981. Read More
Cleopatra Mathis’s poem “Black Walnut" was originally published in The Bottom Land (Sheep Meadow Press, 1983) and is reprinted here by permission of the author.