Gooseberry Fool

The gooseberry’s no doubt an oddity,

an outlaw or pariah even—thorny

and tart as any

kindergarten martinet, it can harbor

like a fernseed, on its leaves’ under-

side, bad news for pine trees,

whereas the spruce

resists the blister rust

it’s host to. That veiny Chinese

lantern, its stolid jelly

of a fruit, not only has

no aroma but is twice as tedious

as the wild strawberry’s sunburst

stem-end appendage: each one must

be between-nail-snipped at both extremities.

Altogether, gooseberry virtues

take some getting

used to, as does trepang,

tripe à la mode de Caen,

or having turned thirteen.

The acerbity of all things green

and adolescent lingers in

it—the arrogant, shrinking,

prickling-in-every-direction thorn-

iness that loves no company except its,

or anyhow that’s what it gets:

bristling up through gooseberry ghetto sprawl

are braced thistles’ silvery, militantly symmetrical

defense machineries. Likewise inseparably en-

tangled in the disarray of an

uncultivated childhood, where gooseberry bushes (since

rooted out) once flourished, is

the squandered volupté of lemon-

yellow-petaled roses’ luscious flimflam—

an inkling of the mingling into one experience

of suave and sharp, whose supremely im-

probable and far-fetched culinary

embodiment is a gooseberry fool.

Tomorrow, having stumbled into

this trove of chief ingredients

(the other being very thickest cream)

I’ll demonstrate it for you. Ever since,

four summers ago, I first brought you,

a gleeful Ariel, the trophy

of a small sour handful,

I’ve wondered what not quite articulated thing

could render magical

the green globe of an unripe berry.

I think now it was simply

the great globe itself’s too much to carry.