Blackberrying.

It was like angry red welts
and Rage Against the Machine
on the radio. 
Something furious
filtered through a degree 
of separation.
Light under water.

Hands wrung out and 
pale with blackberry-picking
scars, the little briars
pulling and sticking
like thorny crowns
in your prophet's head.
You wear these thin lines,
criss-crosses of 
roads you've taken-
or might have,
had they existed at
that time.

Slender wrists
and a black shirt
with sleeves too short,
as you pull all that lion's mane
into a shining mess
of dandelion fluff
and dig elbow deep
into the bleeding
beautiful bundles
that glisten,
bulbous as happy tears,
hit under the sun like
raging hornets.

Pulling handfuls and 
making your shirt into
a quick basket,
childlike,
forgetting yourself
as you tenderly pluck 
the clustered blackberries
and the branches
tell you no,
try weakly to stop
your greedy, purpled hands
with scratchy lines of
beading red that you will let
scar over,

a reminder
to the short season
of happiness and loss
you filter through these
wispy cuts
as you pop tenuous flesh
of these fruits against your teeth.

A degree of separation
the weeks of mourning each year,
as you gather each last plump
bead, each morning in the mist.
Taking them down the deep pasture.
letting them hit the 
crumbling cement
of Baby
3 days
and 
Ivory Mae
3 years.

Favorites.
And you let the lacy
scarring remind you.