13.3.09


Yesterday I drove out to Leppington to pick up a queen-sized mattress. There are complexities concealed in that simple sentence but for various reasons I can't unpack them now. Would that I could. Another time perhaps. The post that I imagined making might have attempted to but this one won't. All I remember now is the pomegranate tree. It was a small tree, not quite as tall as I am. Round. Laden with ripening fruit that looked luscious enough to make six months below ground worth it. So long as you had the other six months above. Pomegranates. How do you eat them? You eat the seeds. Or the pulp around the seeds. All of the longing for the Europe from which its planters came was in that tree. And all of the hope for the Australia to which they came was too. It was the middle of the day, cloudy, muggy, a not much happening sort of a day. The glow of the fruit behind the barbed wire fence in the overgrown orchard. The unquenchable hope, the forbidden longing. The birds that will come to eat the fruit as it splits and falls. I can't forget it. I won't. Pomegranates.


All I have been able to find out about the image is that it comes from 'a Middle Age Armenian Medical Manuscript'.




6 comments:

artandmylife said...

I had to leave my pomegranate tree behind when I moved. I am far too superstitious to eat the seeds.

Larry Buttrose said...

Is this something to do with you wanting to eat forbidden fruit on your queen sized mattress Martin?

Martin Edmond said...

Uh - no. But I can see how the piece might bear the weight of that interpretation, so to speak. There's scraggy little pome trees in the garden of this building. We eat the seeds sometimes.

Elisabeth said...

The complexities of the simple sentence intrigue me too Martin. What could it mean? Pomegranate seeds are one thing, but the image of you lugging a queen sized mattress down some Sydney street in a suburb that holds no meaning for me, landlocked in Melbourne as I am, is so alluring.
Lis

Martin Edmond said...

Lis, Leppington is way out west on the semi rural fringes of the metropolitan area. You could be in, I don't know, Tumbarumba perhaps.

Kay Cooke said...

Sounds like a poem to me. I know what you mean about an image that doesn't just stay with you, but feeds you and gets you through a day that threatens to be otherwise stodgy, or even tedious. (Lugging a mattress would be pretty tedious I'd say.)