How Bad Can Blueberry Pie Be?
I remember one time
over dessert in a roadside diner,
my father asked out loud,
“How bad can blueberry pie be?
Because that’s how bad this is.”
I miss him.
Recollections huddle up—
In response to me asking
what he thought he’d feel
in his last moments of life,
he said he thought he’d be angry.
I asked what he thought he’d say.
“Shit,” he said.
There is a word in Portuguese,
saudade, for the ache of things
that you cannot get back to.
The night is unimpressed,
the silence solid and black,
only the blinking
bulletin of stars,
and a few scraps of sound
somewhere nearby—
two crows having a brief chat.
Crows say what they have to say,
then quiet.
I have tried to learn this skill for years.
*
Peter Schireson grew up in California, studied at UC Berkeley, University of Victoria, and Harvard University. After retiring from a career, first in education and later in business, he returned to school to earn an MFA from The Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He has published six volumes of poems. He has trained in Zen in both the US and Japan, and is married to the psychologist and Zen teacher, Grace Jill Schireson. They live in Palm Springs, California with their small dogs, Dewey and Thomas.
