Sometimes a craving comes for salt, not sweet, 
For fruits that you can eat
Only if pickled in a vat of tears—
A rich and dark and indehiscent meat 
Clinging tightly to the pit—on spears 

Of toothpicks maybe, drowned beneath a tide 
Of vodka and vermouth,
Rocking at the bottom of a wide,
Shallow, long-stemmed glass, and gentrified, 
Or rustic, on a plate cracked like a tooth, 

A miscellany of the humble hues
Eponymously drab—
Brown greens and purple browns, the blacks and blues 
That chart the slow chromatics of a bruise—
Washed down with swigs of barrel wine that stab 

The palate with pine-sharpness. They recall 
The harvest and its toil,
The nets spread under silver trees that foil 
The blue glass of the heavens in the fall— 
Daylight packed in treasuries of oil, 

Paradigmatic summers that decline
Like singular archaic nouns, the troops
Of hours in retreat. These fruits are mine— 
Small bitter drupes
Full of the golden past and cured in brine.