Poem of the Week: 8.10.23
"Through the Pawpaw Patch" by Ricky Novaes de Oliveira
THROUGH THE PAWPAW PATCH
by Ricky Novaes de Oliveira
Colonial grass I trudge upon the dog has to stop to smell to survey the piss the dirt, the dead Under the pawpaw tree with branches blowing all around me Ripening fruit I hadn’t noticed the dog spends the most time sniffing Without a word, the dog decides it’s time to turn tangling the leash all around me Only once we’re out of the woods Do I hear the tornado warning
Read by the poet:
I write to you from under a "pawpaw” tree.
Perhaps you, like me, also had never heard of this funnily-named fruit until now. Pawpaw, the common name for the fruit borne from a deciduous tree native to North America, are small and greenish. They are apparently akin to a “papaya,” though I didn’t taste one to confirm its sweetness. According to Wikipedia, these fruits are similar to those that grow in tropical places like a rainforest—but I found this tree in a field in northwest Arkansas.
I’ve been trying to pay better attention to the natural world lately since the man-made world is easily encompassing. Dogs remind me to do this in the way they stick their snouts in the ground, on spots that seem mundane to me. Something’s there.
With being more attentive comes curiosity. Wikipedia also told me about an American folk song that muses on the indigenous plant, making reference to a "pawpaw patch" that represents the plant's “characteristic patch-forming colonial growth habit.” Except that in my reading was a malapropism—I read colonial growth habit when instead it was written clonal growth habit. What was meant is the pawpaw fruit grows by cloning itself, but what I initially understood was a fruit representative of colonial America’s manifest-destiny contamination of native life. A holdout rather than just another.
Today feels so far away from what once was, from what’s under the grass, from when past people once saw the same fruit. “Through the Pawpaw Patch” holds a moment of stopping to smell the roses pawpaws, but reels back into the reality of the present ever twisting into future. We’re closer than we think.
Sniffing, Ricky
