Next to the Tomatoes and Plums Weeping
I’ve always been an easy crier (let it come, not ashamed, never held it back in joy or grief, and wherever … subway, teaching, grocery store, (oh the desolate grocery store during the height of Covid) but now, the welling up: that’s daily now. —Lia Purpura
Lia. I did it again, damn, I cried in the car.It was this morning. It was in front of the ducks and the grass and the Teslasand the woman in the Tesla saw me and smiledand the sky that wanted to shake my hand but it was too busy being the skyand I was not embarrassed.I wept and I thought of you, next to the tomatoes and the plums, weeping,next to the asparagus and the toilet paper and the peanut butterand rice milk, weeping.Your curly black hair, in tears.I sat in my car and did me inthe way Dylan always does me ineven when it’s .Most days I am no warrior unless I am a warrior of tears.I mean all this to say that you were always a warrior of openness.A long time agoI’d turn a corner on Johnson Street and there you were in the Iowasoybean stinkand your head would be hysterical in a full body heave charging throughthe heart.You have always known how to cry for the world—or with the world—even when it wasn’t on the daily.There is so much loss to pick upand there is so much joy to put in a paper bag how could it not be a routine.You’ve known this for your whole life andI imagine you this morning in a chair with a basket of tea, crying.For nothing. For everything.The whole miracle of sorrow in your heart.Can I say that in a poem?I know I can because when you turn in your chair, close your eyes,your face in the breezefalling apart is not your own, it is everyone’s.But that’s why we cry in our cars and in our Bob Dylans and in ourWhole Foods.That is why we do this every day.It does not matter if we are in the classroom or the boardroom orthe back alleyor it is visiting hours or the hour before dusk.We have to cry every day.We have to break down every dayto put shit back togetherso the next time we see the person we loveor the stranger that scares uswe can say hello and reach out our body to meet them in their bodywhere all the tomatoes and steaks and strawberries and forest firesand pencils and distraught Buddhasget down to the businessof being better.
