ZEST OF GALWAY KINNELL 317of the springing Chogi stick
glided close to the hard smooth path.Then “Shot, on the way, out,” and “shrapnel catches the gliding baskets, / and
they crumple with the woman in blue.” Slantways, painfully, we ’re getting eco-
logic news. It took long practice to load those baskets just so they’d glide close
to the path, a path made hard and smooth over many native generations.
A closeness to earth comes down through Whitman to Galway Kinnell, and
a zest that language passes along. “It just seems the more ordinary and close at
hand is often the more true and real,” he once said. The interviewer asked, “Can
you go on a little more with that idea?” “Well no. I think that ’s enough.”
Blackberry Eating
I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengthsorsquinched,
many-lettered, one-syllable lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry-eating in late September.