--evening, everyone. مساء الخير in case there
are Arabic speakers out there.
Thank you to everyone at the Poetry Center for being
just phenomenal hosts.
This is really a special place that you've created.
It's full of heart.
And it's given me just some peace in a really turbulent time
today.
So thank you for sharing it with me.
I'm going to do something different than I usually do,
which is, I'm going to start in my grandmother's garden.
And then we'll get to the other things.
Apricots.
In Rome last summer, I learned that there
are seven varieties of apricots, that they are distinguished
not only by their physical appearance, the freckles
on their skin, or the percentage of it that reddens on the vine,
but also by the month in which they ripen.
Damascus, my grandmother's city, is
known for the apricots of its Ghouta Valley, each name ending
in a lingering ee.
Baladee, the original descendant of the ancients
of China and the Korean Peninsula,
or Klaabee, the bitter armeniaca vulgaris,
hearty fruit of the Eastern steppe,
or Mawardee, with its flirtatious
name and promise of perfume.
That long ee of the possessive claims the apricot
for the country, the animal wilderness,
for water softened with roses.
Last summer in Rome, turning the corner onto Piazza de Santa
Maria, the clink of the morning's last cappuccino
glasses and low growls of Vespas on the street
gave no indication of the city I would travel to a few steps
forward.
I wasn't thinking of the jam-colored sunsets of Amman,
the stone fruits and wedding music that
filled my grandmother's garden, the serrated leaves
of her apricot tree.
Then a scent drifted up from the cobblestones, a thickness,
a palpable haze of flesh beginning to spoil,
of sugar turning in sunlight.
In Amman, a tree, like the one leaning on a wall in the piazza,
had rained over our childhood, baladee apricots,
like shattered lanterns, aglow at its base,
darkening, gathering droves of ants, the ravenous taking.
Not the perfume of Damascus mawardee nor the silk
handkerchief of blossoms, not the fruit's citrus kiss,
it was the scent of spoiling, of too much sweetness
that claimed me.
Long cry at the end of the ballad of old summers.
In Amman, it is known that an apricot harvest can
be ruined by untimely frost and that, like Rome, the city
is built on seven hills.