The Traveler’s Vade Mecum, Line #4646: “Vegetation Grows Rapidly”
Biting into a Calmyrna fig I taste
the frantic wasp, how her wings tore off
at the unripe hull’s door.
How her ovipositor thrust, failing,
enzymes seducing her gravid body,
which had already hauled itself free
from the goat fruit
swollen with her sisters—
caprifigs stapled by the handful to each tree,
married to the Calmyrna orchard.
I can hear those paper bags singing.
The air ripples with sugar.
The farmer tells me each fig
is a bloom, housed in its own stem.
My teeth slice to the nutty roe of drupelets,
a bouquet left on a graveyard stone. 