PLUM ESSAY
“WHAT WASTE IS IMPLICIT IN FRUITION”
/// picture: an eden of an oakland backyard. luscious fruit trees, bushes of ripeness, buds and blooms abound. jasmine winds serenading nostrils. a lawn of wood-chips and whatever nature’s neighbors leave behind. green, grey and gold, gold everywhere—peaking through the leaves, vibrating off skin, gilding all the eye can globe.
In 2020, amidst the ongoing quarantine, I spent much of my time in the backyard of my then-home. The sprawling space was a jewel-plot of land tucked squarely in the heart of Oak Center—a small neighborhood of three or so flourishing, verdant blocks in West Oakland, CA.
In the center of this Elysium rested a four-by-four stone-tiled plaza plopped just a few paces from a most luxuriant plum tree. I watched that tree with a fervent devotion as it moved through its life cycles. From winter dormancy to spring’s green-white buds to a certain overabundance as it bloomed into summer.
It is said that mature plum trees can bear up to forty to fifty pounds of plums in a year. I believe my backyard neighbor was reaching its own maturity. Each day I went out to greet and commune with this beloved tree, I was overcome by the tree’s dedication to multiplication—its three gnarly stems of trunk reaching out, taking up sky-space with a shameless gumption. That year, I admired the tree for its commitment to taking up space, and, also, admired the ways in which it brought me to ruminate on the intersections of cycles of life and waste—for both plum and animal.
The word “plum” appears twenty-eight times throughout CRUEL/CRUEL and became a grounding object throughout the spiraling sonic fantasia of the poems in the collection. As summer shifted to autumn, the plum tree took on a new stage. The weighty purple fruits began to hang from their branches, low enough to grab. Many in the overabundant bloom fell to the ground below, where each morning a new record of feasting was on display.
Animals of all sorts passed through that backyard—ravens, squirrels, cats, turkeys, hummingbirds—and each morning the area around the plum tree was littered with plums half or entirely eaten, split open, left to rot in the unceasing Bay Area sun. Or, for whatever scavenger would sweep through and devour the leftover detritus.
I was stunned at how the tree seemed to produce more than enough for everyone in our neighborhood’s ecosystem. So much so that several fully ripe plums laid on the ground untouched and unblemished. After most of the plums had fallen, the scene around the tree was macabre in an exquisite autumnal fashion—it was approaching the end of this journey I’d been blessed enough to witness.
The plum and the plum tree, then, became a philosophical center for me. Or, if not center, a lily pad of poetic thought, leading me to reflect on what exactly it meant for such fruition, such overabundance, to result in death, rot, and souring. And how, in a number of ways, these stages of growth remarked upon the trends of capitalism, (over)production and exploitation in Western society.
I couldn’t help but wonder, day after day, if this cycle—that of bud to bloom to death and decay—was inevitable in all arenas of life. We all know that every living thing will one day come to die, but what of the structures, institutions and empires that we all operate in and that continue to outlive us? Are they exempt from this trajectory? How have we, as a collective society, allowed and perpetuated these superstructures? The plum led me to wonder: in our current reality—our day-to-day—how might we envision the dismantling of this exploitative “united” empire and craft the beginning of something fresh? What tools would this require, from human and nature alike? Tools that would upend this cycle of fruitless waste and repurpose rot, decay and destruction with recycling, reprocessing, recirculation for the benefit of all?
The plum tree embodies this process, as do the fruits it produces. Even the rotten plums cast to the Earth would, over time, get composted or mashed into the soil where its end-of-life might bring about the beginning stages of, potentially, another several cycles.
And this was precisely where I found myself stuck in thought, within the realization that Mother Nature has, arguably, already perfected this cycle and that the fruits of its labor are always around us—integrated into every waking moment we experience on this Earth.
There are so many tiny moments in this life where I am floored at the inconceivable wonder of all nature is—what it can do and create—and just how beautifully it does it. How it’s been doing this for thousands of years. How it will, hopefully, continue to do so long after humanity has reached the end of its life cycle. I wondered: how might the plum, as object, elucidate a new paradigm of communal potential?
Though we’re a long way off from that ending (maybe-probably), I came to another pothole in my philosophical pondering. In “UYP 7” I ask “WHAT WASTE IS IMPLICIT IN FRUITION?” Now, with some time and space, I’d like to speak the unspoken word I’ve always imagined to exist, hidden, in that query: “WHAT WASTE IS IMPLICIT IN [OUR] FRUITION?”. “OUR” meaning us, and by us I mean all of us living (surviving) in the United States.
Yearly, the U.S. produces nearly 300 million tons of waste per year (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency). About half of this ends up in landfills which, much like the plum tree, take up space. Surely, a fair portion of this waste is necessary in a population of over three-hundred-million, but, conversely, we know most of this waste is not necessary. I use words like “we” and “our” to speak to a collective, national identity and humanity that is often overlooked.
Therefore, when I make use of a word like “IMPLICIT” and pair it with “we” and “ours” I am reaching at a collective blame, knowing full well that some culprits (corporations, big business, and the like) hold more of the fault than the individual person ever could. Still, by implicating myself and ourselves as a collective unit, I am pointing the proverbial finger at myself, and inviting the reader to do the same to themselves. To think and consider what waste you leave behind in this life and what you do with it.
My approach to the creation of this poem was also centered around another word, though not an object: split. The image of the plums split open and left scattered in the dirt is one so striking that I can vividly recall it today. This idea of splitting the poem allowed me to envision how I wanted the poem to embody both a certain philosophic, bombastic queer-ing of “plum” alongside a more tempered contemplation of what our relationship with waste is in the U.S.
In the first section of “UYP 7” I utilize the plum as I hop between, through, and around various associative thought. This is seen in lines like: “PLUM HONEY,” “PLUM OVERABUNDANCE,” “PLUM MERITOCRACY,” and “PLUM WEIGHT OF ALL” wherein the word following “plum” is meant to hold the breadth of the associative, contemplative weight. Though seemingly haphazard and indiscriminate, each word in the poem speaks to, implicates or complicates the intersection of plum and waste.
A few examples: “HONEY,” a product of the lifecycle of bees which, also, are known to create more than is needed for each respective hive—a “waste” many of us happily consume. “MERITOCRACY,” as a slightly naive, hopeful imagining of a new societal order of operations, one in which our individual strengths come together to visualize and create new organizations and collectives, which leans into “WEIGHT OF ALL,” bringing it back to the image of that glorious plum tree—how the trunk and branches worked in harmony to hold onto the growing plums for as long as they could.
These words and phrases flash across the page much like interchanging slides in a cinematographe, an early motion picture device that projected various images from manually loaded slides. If you’re at all familiar with the (outstanding) 1999 film Tarzan, you’ll recall a scene where Jane and her father, Professor Archimedes Q. Porter, show Tarzan images of “civilized” society. Later in the scene, Tarzan takes over the projector and begins to rapidly, hungrily cycle through the images at breakneck speed. This is typically how associative thought flows through my mind—hastily, and with an urgency that mischievously waves at my mind’s eye as it zooms by, leaving me musing in its wake.
The split, or volta, in the second section of “UYP 7” takes the poem away from this dizzying wake and slows the thought-train from high-speed to commuter crawl, opening the space for the power of the plosive “p” to shine through. By focusing and building on the linguistic strength of the letter “p” as plosive, section “i” can then be envisioned as the articulation and build up of pressure made from bringing the lips tightly together. Thereby, the second section, “ii,” is that brilliant release of air into something between a sigh and a prayer. The proverbial plum is, in essence, split open, ending with three words that were haunting me in the summer and autumn of 2020—“pretending & / polling & proclivities &.”
Utilizing the plum as object granted me the space to bridge the gap between three of my most cherished thought-spaces: nature, associative thought, and sound.Through the poet’s greatest skill—the act of noticing and witnessing—I was guided from witnessing a cycle of life thread connections to considerations of waste in our quotidian lives.
I often find nature, in all of its forms and processes, to be my greatest thought collaborator. And, like nature, the poem ends with an ampersand—a nod to the notion that these thoughts, much like the beloved plum tree, can and will begin anew and go on into fruitful, if even overabundant, perpetuity.
