Dreaming the Fruited Damson Tree

A good dream if one is so fortunate as to see these trees lifting their branches loaded with rich purple fruit, but to dream of eating them at any time forebodes grief.

– dream dictionary

Someone once said that the tree in her yard bore a resemblance to a man. And so she stood and looked at the tree until it did, each limb arcing just so as if to embrace her. And when the birds stood in winter on the bare branches they looked like so children and she grew to adore him. In the spring when nests sprouted eggs and fingered flowers dotted his boughs, she dared ask: will you marry me? The wind administered their vows.

Across the season his petals fell like small shirts clothing the loam.

As the globes swelled day after day she sat beneath and read to them.

When they grew large enough she named them, and as each ripened she gently picked them, and ate them.

They were sweet.

Praise for small fruit songs:

Like bees extracting pollen, Cati Porter has found the rich and mysterious nourishment of the things in front of us, the poetry in plain view. In deceptively simple language, she startles us into insights. We’re presented with a delightfullly off-kilter world where a woman weds a tree while “the wind administers vows,” where another woman, “large with grief and belly full of bees,” would like to scream but finds “her mouth has become a honeycomb, her teeth and tongue coated in golden duress.” Small fruit songs is nothing short of delicious.”  
    
    – Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Unmentionables (W.W. Norton, 2008)

Your chapbook came and I am enjoying it. I want to congratulate you on being a very strange person - and I mean that seriously and in the best possible way. I think the slanted eye and sensibilities that can write Frugal and False Fruit are compelling and even necessary. I applaud anyone who loves words enough to look them up - and give us etymologies but your Fructify goes beyond that to give us “Her hands make a basket for flowers that grow out of the creases where dirt has collected.” Hurray for you.

    -- Deborah Bogen, author of Landscape with Silos (Texas Review Press, 2005)

What others have to say about small fruit:

small fruit songs in the Chapbook Spotlight on Diane Lockward’s Blogalicious

Bridget Kelly-Lossada’s Dreams of Trespass

Mary Alexandra Agner’s Pantoums & Persistence