Coagulate

 For more than a week
      The persimmon
      Diospyros kaki
 Stood on the high counter
 Its bulbous teardrop mass, slowly
      Turning translucent
 Transforming from astringent fiber
 To almost liquid
      Sugar
 
 Now cut into quarters
 Radiant, ambrosial, wholly
      Unearthly as only 
 Fruit from this mysterious earth
      Can be
 I set it upon my plate
 Its neat sections oozing 
 Dripping on white
      Porcelain
 
 Meal finished
 I cast a finger across plate
 Catching that last
      Spilled morsel
 An orange ink splotch
 Finger leaving behind a hard, dark
 Ring where the juice has
      Coagulated
 
 Coagulate
      Species of transformation
 Magic first named
 When seeing milk turned to rennet
      Or blood turned to clot
 And stain
 
 Coagulate
      Here tracing that great circle
 Hard pome
 To ripening, pliant, yielding gel globe
 Only to return when
      Exposed
 To air, molecules stiff in their renewed
      Congregation
 
 How is it 
      That all things
 Permissions to empires
 Wars to romance
 Liquify only to coagulate
 Coagulate only to
      Harden
      Brittle-form
 The way we look upon 
 Someone we once loved
 Or throw spears
 With clenched eyes
      Hating the other?
 
 How is it
      Each moment 
 Ripening to decay
 The entropy that breaks us
 Clears space
      For  beginnings.
 

 8 December 2018
 Cedar Wings Cottage
 Moon in 1st crescent
 

* Persimmon, from the Algonquin, entering into English when British colonists learned the use of the astringent Diospyros virginiana from the indigenous people; Diospyros, from the Greek ‘food of the gods,’ for the genus of trees, the commercially grown varieties originating in Japan.