Picking Blackberries with a Friend Who Has Been Reading Jacques Lacan

August is dust here. Drought

stuns the road,

but juice gathers in the berries.

We pick them in the hot

slow-motion of midmorning.

Charlie is exclaiming:

for him it is twenty years ago

and raspberries and Vermont.

We have stopped talking

about L'Histoire de la verite,

about subject and object

and the mediation of desire.

Our ears are stoppered

in the bee-hum. And Charlie,

laughing wonderfully,

beard stained purple

by the word juice,

goes to get a bigger pot.