Noble Marriage, A Persimmon Story
By
H. Kent Craig
©2000
Creation reality, not creation myth, reaching towards
heaven, feeling towards Hades, sprouting branches instead
of angel wings, soul slowly progressing towards infinity,
wooden heart emboldened emblazoned with the here and now, a
new life pre-destined not is rooted in my past.
Early summer wind days gently swaying my memories it's mate
simultaneously takes root a few hundred feet away.
Forbidden by fate the pleasure of actually ever touching
only the breezes link communication between the two, the
seeds of pollen and pollination wafting across timeless and
endless reaches of heartbreak as they strain to whisper
nothings and greatings between the backyard and the far end
of the garden.
Into this slipstream of life's river I'm dropped, my hand
touching, my thoughts linking with Mr. Persimmon upon my
arrival to this island childhood at my new corner lot home
in the New South in the New Age. His sadness real, his
understanding of what must be even more real, his thoughts
touch my soul as we speak the silent language of imaginary
childhood. He shows me the Great Link he has with his wife,
Mrs. Persimmon, several hundred yards away at the far end
of the garden, showing me the endless Gordian Knot loops
which binds all things living and not to each other.
And in each late May, he spills his seed upon the ground,
but unlike Onan is not smote by God for it, because it is
his fate, not his sin. Carried by the flying carpenter
bumblebees and honeybees and whatever physical and
spiritual corporal beggar that chooses to help him, his
genetic heritage somehow beats all odds and finds his mate
upwind and downhill of him, and their progeny uterined in
pisteline pristineness until that fall are nestled in naked
openness.
Spent, his stamenesque husks fall to the ground, feeding
the lawn grass at his feet with essential life-force, the
manna of the life's work done gossamered by frenzied
bacterium webbing the tips of weekly green chores to be
done with an Irish lace-curtain doilly of soft-footed
sensations under my bare feet and sweet-smelling spikes to
my nose similar to his magnolia neighbor just a few feet
away. And in the fall, like an appropo Greek-tragedy ending
to a great love story about between two lovers destined
never to touch, the children that he and his mate at the
end of the garden produced that season of their lives are
eaten and shat out of beings thinking they're higher
instead equal in God's plan with them, the essence and
force of life hopefully being planted elsewhere, but never
knowing I, because no other brood seedlings are ever
popping up in my purview.
The hope they show me, the cycle of life, creation, and
renewal of hope by small tragedies along the way, is a
lesson which will take me a lifetime to truly comprehend,
if I can ever shed my ego long enough to learn it. And in
the end, when the slow but inevitable legion-drum incanting
of progress thundering towards an overwhelming crescendo
culminating in the steel sword of the bulldozer blades
defeating their root front line so deeply buried into the
North Carolina soil and my childhood daydreams, I will keep
my unspoken to the world until now promise made to Mr. &
Mrs. Persimmon so long ago and cut their very hearts out of
their corewood and sculpt a monument to each, intertwining
their respective grainworks blending their visible
deadcells into a living but not breathing representation of
the bond that they shared for their one hundred plus years
together yet apart.
And when my time comes, and my soul is freed of it's ego, I
will finally be allowed to touch and share in their joy of
final fulfillment, final fulfillment of new beginnings from
old seeds of realization and reality scattered to the four
winds which separates us from our destiny, as that same
separation bonded Mr. & Mrs. Persimmon's marriage in a way
only they understand.
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