Persimmon

By Caroline Caddy b. 1944 Caroline Caddy

Like buying a ticket inland

to barely understandable provinces

with no language at all I bargain and pay

for this warm planet

tipping the scales of wrist and elbow

spreading my fingers with its weight to read

my life-line my heart-line

my seams and mounds of fortune.

I stare

into the sun on smoggy evenings

the throat of an old street oven

that seems to expand as I anticipate

its glow engulfing my solar system.

I open my mouth

and China fills it sliding into tartness

forcing my lips

to begin its name

over and over then finger-painting my chin

with the gel of ripeness.

I swallow the pabulum of infancy

the sweet mucilage of age.

It makes me eat like a person alone

who hasn’t loved for years.

There seems to be no core

the few black seeds hardly noticed

in its one undifferentiated cell

other tongue

that makes mine lazy the flavour . . .

the flavour is . . .

my hand moves like an incantation

through an alley of blunt flames

that can be eaten with a spoon.

I gorge

on a people’s staple

fat Buddha squat Amida

repeat three times

persimmon persimmon persimmon

and go to heaven.

Caroline Caddy, “Persimmon” text from Esperance, Fremantle Press, 2007; audio from The Tibetan Cabinet, Audio CD River Road Press: 2010 by permission of River Road Press and the poet. Copyright © 2007, 2010 by Caroline Caddy.

Source: Esperance (Fremantle Press, 2007)

Biography

Born in Perth, poet Caroline Caddy grew up in the United States and Japan before returning to Australia as an adult. Caddy’s poems, lingering in the landscapes of China, Antarctica, and western Australia, explore identity through the process of travel and observation. Floating free of the left-hand margins, her poems make use of caesuras to emphasize the connections and gaps between cultures and geographies. “Creating a space . . .

Continue reading this biography