I've mentioned before that when I was in high school I had a wonderful English teacher, Mr. Collier. We had two years to plod through literature exams with him, and rather than devote the entire time to the prescribed works, he decided to spend the first year stimulating our love of the written word, with a series of challenging and involving books. Apart from introducing me to some of my favourite novels, such as The French Lieutenant's Woman and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and recommending his class of bright, eager 14 year olds to go and watch Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex, But were Afraid to Ask, he brought poetry to life.

He had an unerring instinct for what concerned the hormonal adolescent and what engaged their interest. This meant, of course, that we were served a diet of drama, love, sex and death. Strawberries, by Edwin Morgan, qualifies as on three counts; it's dramatic, loving and sexual – it was my first exposure to poetry that was both openly erotic, and written in modern English which didn't mask the eroticism in unfamiliar language, as Donne and the other metaphysical poets tended to, until you cracked their code.

It still makes me shiver, now.

Strawberries

There were never strawberries
like the ones we had
that sultry afternoon
sitting on the step
of the open french window
facing each other
your knees held in mine
the blue plates in our laps
the strawberries glistening
in the hot sunlight
we dipped them in sugar
looking at each other
not hurrying the feast
for one to come
the empty plates
laid on the stone together
with the two forks crossed
and I bent towards you
sweet in that air

in my arms
abandoned like a child
from your eager mouth
the taste of strawberries
in my memory
lean back again
let me love you

let the sun beat
on our forgetfulness
one hour of all
the heat intense
and summer lightning
on the Kilpatrick hills

let the storm wash the plates

Edwin Morgan

As an aside, I heard from Mr. Collier recently – he took early retirement from teaching and now works as a librarian. I envy any reader who asks him for recommendations.

Poem noded with permission

So it is June after all, I found myself picking strawberries, and in a moment of hubris I dared imagine myself sipping the strawberry melomel made last year, a reward for picking strawberries tonight, an artifice of closure. I had the illusion of control, imagining a yearly cycle, and I missed the marvelous moment of standing in a garden barefoot picking strawberries under a kind June evening sky by imagining a moment that had not yet come to exist.

Hubris. I was bold enough (foolish, really) to pay attention to an imagined moment when at that moment I was knee deep in my June strawberry patch, sunwarmed heartberries squishing under my toes as I picked and picked and ate and picked shiny red globs of goodness from a patch of earth bare just 3 months ago.

Hubris because I looked for the best strawberries, as though a perfect strawberry could even exist, since no berry could be more perfect than the one crushed between my teeth, or none so perfectly sized as the one nestled in my palm as I ate the other, or none so perfectly red as the strawberry I eyed as ate yet another, none so perfectly aromatic as the one squashed under my toes at this moment.

---

If you seek the perfect strawberry, you miss the point.

---

I was busy missing the point, imagining myself sipping the strawberry melomel then chilling in the freezer (but which I am now sipping, this moment, as good as only this moment can allow, unfettered by comparisons to the memory of a strawberry I ate just a half hour ago).

I cannot remember how good strawberries taste, even three minutes after I eat one. I cannot remember now in June how desperately I needed THIS strawberry back in February, when THIS strawberry did not exist. This is not a Platonic universe. The berry was not a seed waiting to be....

So I have (a little) faith that come March or April enough energy will be ejected earthward by sun (and try wrapping yourself around the idea of something like the sun) and air and water and earth will combine to make a strawberry (not any strawberry, but this one) when I need it now in June.

And as much as I might try to capture the strawberry of the moment in a bottle of mead, to taste in the darkness of next February, the only strawberry that matters now is the one in my mouth.

But back to my hubris...

I had my colander sitting on the purple glass orb that frames the garden when my wife Leslie comes out to say goodbye.

She is going out to dinner with Fran tonight, Fran is going to lose her left breast in a week. I am getting to the age when friends losing parts is no longer novel, but it is bloody surprising nonetheless.

Fran likes strawberries.

And, Leslie says, do you mind if I take the batch on the counter (the one she picked yesterday), to Fran? Is this OK?

No, it is not. I know a strawberry picked even an hour, a minute, off the plant is not the same--indeed, I will someday be senile enough to be out among my strawberries, sucking the fruit directly off the stem, like a giant, warm-blooded slug, still, no doubt, crushing too many under my careless feet.

My wife hesitates--she knew I was collecting for next winter's mead, and she knows I get hung up on moments that do not yet exist--because she knows this, she understands my violence of moods better than anyone.

But Fran is a friend, and she needs a real strawberry now more than I need the imagined one tomorrow.

So now, as I write, Fran is getting her strawberries, and she will laugh with her friends tonight. Later tonight she may cry, as she and her lifemate caress a less than perfect breast--as though a perfect breast could even exist. Certainly none so perfect as the one once held between the toothless gums of her child, the nipple creating the same ache in her nursing child a June strawberry creates in me.

Indians called strawberries heartberries, and now I will call them heartberries, too. Tonight Fran will eat fresh heartberries, and her chest will ache as she imagines what she faces in a few days, but tonight she will laugh and laugh and laugh.

At least, in my hubris, as I imagine she will do.