Strawberry on the Drawbridge by Matthea Harvey
Today I picked strawberries in my cousin’s pickin’ patch. Then I made jam and bread and a smoothie. YUM! I was delighted to find this poem.
Strawberry on the Drawbridge
By Matthea Harvey
I tried eating one there on the bridge’s fault line, listening out for
the dispatcher’s radio so that I’d know if a ship was coming and the
road was about to split in two—I love when roads give up on going
anywhere and point up towards the heavens. But standing on tiptoe
on that crenellated bit of metal (tongue in groove, groove in tongue)
didn’t give me the right feeling. Ships were few. And it made me
imagine myself being split in two, like St. Simon, martyred length-
wise down the middle, which was a feeling I already knew.
For my experiment, I needed an abandoned drawbridge. I found it
in Delaware. It was no star, with its rusted rivets and peeling paint,
but it was what I was looking for. I got out my orange cones and po-
lice tape and cordoned off the area. As a last touch, I put on a uni-
-form I’d bought at the Salvation Army. Then I made a little mound
of earth right in the center of the bridge and planted my strawberry
plant. I put a bell jar over it and sat next to it, shifting every half
hour so that my shadow wouldn’t block the sun. Sometimes, I sat in
the control box and polished the controls. Finally, one day the plant
sprouted a tiny green strawberry dead center and a week later it was
good and red and round. On that long-anticipated day, I pressed
play on the tape recorder: Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right—
here I am, stuck in the middle with you. On the word “middle,” I low-
ered the lever and raised by my best binoculars to my eyes.
The bridge groaned and began to open. Some of the roots went
to the left, some to the right. The bell jar wobbled, then toppled into
the water with a celebratory splash. Soil sifted into the river. And
the strawberry hung there, suspended between its two sets of roots
and stems like an atom in a science experiment. First the skin, with
its little grainy seeds strained, then split. Then as the fleshy part
broke open, I could see the pale V of its interior and when that split
too, the words finally separated into straw and berry and draw and
bridge, and like recombinant DNA, formed new ones. Strawbridge.
Drawberry. In the world they conjured the straw bridges were sharp
and shiny, too delicate to cross, and there in the berry patches were
the artists, islanded at their easels.
