This Is Just To Say

Not that I am complaining, but let me say that August has burdened me with this holy glut of plums, yellow sungolds and purple damsons and they are ripening by the second. Three big bowls full, in varying stages of melting away from their stones. I’ve just taken a bunch of them and made a crimson sauce by pushing the flesh from the acrid skin, and I am now mulling over whether to turn that into what? Maybe a fruit soup or plum butter or a salsa -- how would plum salsa taste?

But instead of doing anything with my little sauce, I sit here and read about plums: cousins of the cherry and member of the rose family; with wild strains native to China, the Kaucacus, as well as parts of Europe and the Americas. The fruits were among the first to be cultivated by the Assyrians in ancient times, and so from Persia, Alexander the Great introduced the damson into Greece. Later on, although many plums were indigenous to North America, the European settlers brought other varieties with them, just in case.

So today plums are grown in most every temperate climate in the world. A not-at-all exhaustive search along the plumcentric sites of the Internet brings up Agens, Angelinos, Autumn Roses, Avalons, Beach plums, Black Ambers, Burbanks, Burgundies, Catalinas, Cherry plums, Circielas, Czars, Denniston's Superbs, Fortunes, Friars, Gaviotas, Larodas, Marjorie’s Seedlings, Mirabelles or Myrobalans, Nubianas, Queen Rose, Quetsches or Zwetschens or Svetsches, Reeves Seedlings, Santa Rosas, Showtimes, Simkas, Stanleys, Sungolds, Victorias…

Where was I? And then of course there is Mr. William Carlos Williams’ most famous and sexy and lovely plum thievery poem, which suggests that I may suggest to any and all potential plum thieves reading this, if anyone is reading this, that as he himself may have said, after he walked across the water -- my icebox is your icebox, baby.

This Is Just To Say:

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold