Jim Daniels: “The Peaches”
THE PEACHES
When I am tired and locked in despair
and no combination of memories
will release me
there are always the peaches
of summer 1985 bicycling the Adriatic
coast in Communist Yugoslavia
searching for my wife’s cousin
who had missed our ferry’s arrival
and was rumored to be up the coast
without a phone. We’d waited
for hours at the docks watching
joyful reunions until even the workers
disappeared into that grim dark
then pushed our bikes
to a tourist hotel and ate dinner
with a sad Elvis impersonator
and overpriced everything.
I skipped the hour at the bus station
and our refusal to bribe the driver
to slide our bikes in the luggage
bins below. We gave away a carton
of Marlboros just to find the hotel.
Fuck Uncle Rudy, I said, handing
it over to a sweet furtive girl.
Many miles away, the peaches slept,
heavy with ripeness on tangled dark trees.
In the morning, toothless old peasants
in black skirts twisted them off branches
with their delicate claws and placed them
in baskets cushioned with dish clothes
and carried them to a roadside table
under a large shade tree. The day
already turned to broil.
Meanwhile, under that blaze
we set off with our one direction:
North. Follow the coast. Look for
a sign. Across the vacant hours,
the rocky coast, our water bottles
empty, our throats crusted
into the desperate lack
of civilization. We found
an open abandoned store.
They’d sold their daily quota
and gone home or hid in the back.
Stuck with our abundance
of mirages, we imagined
dark movement under
that tree until close enough
to make it real—the old women,
their peaches. We had enough
dinars to buy a basket
and sit down under that tree
to suck down peach
after ripe, overripe peach—
nothing could be overripe
except our joyful relief
as we slurped like wild animals
as if we had discovered the first
peaches on earth, our sticky hands,
pulpy faces. The women smiled
and laughed, gesturing toward
another basket after we finished
the first, offering us a dish cloth.
There are always the peaches.
I have never known such thirst.
Even now, I have no idea
how much further we will have
to pedal and whether her cousin
killed in the civil war
will be waiting for us
to take us to the nudist camp
for tourists where the grocery store
will be open and stocked.
We live with our mirages
of heaven. All I know
is that in the darkness
of overpriced Elvis nightmares
I can still suck dry those peaches,
the pulp between my teeth,
spitting out the pits
as the tumblers click into place.
Jim Daniels’ latest book, The Luck of the Fall, fiction, was published by Michigan State University Press. Recent poetry collections include The Human Engine at Dawn (Wolfson Press), Gun/Shy (Wayne State University Press), and Comment Card (Carnegie Mellon University Press). His first book of nonfiction, Ignorance of Trees, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press. A native of Detroit, he currently lives in Pittsburgh and teaches in the Alma College low-residency MFA program.