HELLO LITTLE CHERRY IF THAT'S WHAT YOU ARE

 

The cherries pictured here aren't from my own trees, though at this time of year they could be. (The orchid is a definite outlier.)

The image was made in my backyard on an August afternoon six or seven years ago. Today, coming across it again, I'm interested in how the cherries are so shiny they reflect the sky, trees and shrubs, and the screen house. Each cherry catches a different facet of the scene and throws it back, curved.

If I could enlarge it enough, and if the timing of the picture-making had been just right, maybe I'd even see the fly-past of a vee of geese, the first we'd seen that season. 

But I can enlarge it only so far before the image loses definition.

What happens when it loses definition is that the cherry holding the reflected image starts to become something else, something that defeats my expectations and assumptions about 'cherry.' It becomes an anti-cherry. A so-you-thought-you-knew-cherries cherry. 

A ceci n'est pas une pipe of a cherry. 

A cherry without edges, borderless, grainy, indistinguishable from the shadows between cherries.

And staring at the image, it strikes me again that most of life is like this. Most things turn out upon reflection to be much less fixed than I think. People, land; objects I hold in my hands; actions I hold to be inevitable, rights indelible.

That, for me, is where (and when and how) poetry begins: with enlargement, expansion; and why reading and writing it matters.