The Standing Wave: Poems (National Poetry Series)

The Mission Olive

It's time, the day says, as it
always does, the coming rains
will rake them from the tree
if you don't first, the olives,
huge from months of purpling
like a hammerer's ripe thumb.
The lawn's peppered already
with the season's first windfall,
the flagstones bludgeoned where skins
have split open under feet
that track the ink indoors.
So I hobble, earth's butler,
up-ladder to the tree's great
relief, a plastic bucket
to receive the day's take.
My hand's small tongues grow blacker
in swallowing the dark fruit
dangling like gems of tar or
opulent mussels clustered
to some sea beast's restless
green and silvered mane. They thunk
into the pail like days
into a lifetime, bearing
down with the full heaviness
of their hidden gold of oil.
But though they've stuffed themselves
with sweet sun, still they taste
foul as bile — the faithless man
would surely chuck them. But
the patient man knows every
bitterness has its cure.
One fruit grower's handbook,
printed 1908, suggests
a broth of pot-ash lye, or
a months-long soaking in pure
well water, but the method
I favor's even older
than these words, passed down by a
people who knew how human
were the gods in all things, how
easy to manipulate.
Do nothing, they say, but leave
the new moons to wrinkle
in a colander, pomaced
in a mound of plain sea salt.
In two weeks' time, they'll forget,
as we all do, the source
of their hearts' pitched burning,
lose it in the harsh tears
their bodies will rain as they
soften into succulence,
helpless to resist the sweet
waking of their pearl-black flesh.

An exciting first collection of poetry from an emerging talent, Gabriel Spera's The Standing Wave was a winner of the 2002 National Poetry Series Open Competition, selected by esteemed poet Dave Smith.

For over twenty years, the National Poetry Series has discovered many new and emerging voices and has been instrumental in launching the careers of poets and writers such as Billy Collins, Mark Doty, Denis Johnson, Cole Swensen, Thylias Moss, Mark Levine, and Dionisio Martinez.

An exciting first collection of poetry from an emerging talent, Gabriel Spera's The Standing Wave was a winner of the 2002 National Poetry Series Open Competition, selected by esteemed poet Dave Smith.

For over twenty years, the National Poetry Series has discovered many new and emerging voices and has been instrumental in launching the careers of poets and writers such as Billy Collins, Mark Doty, Denis Johnson, Cole Swensen, Thylias Moss, Mark Levine, and Dionisio Martinez.

Gabriel Spera's poems have appeared in Chicago Review, Crazyhorse, Doubletake, Epoch, Folio, Greensboro Review, Laurel Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, New England Review, Ontario Review, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and Southern Review. His work also appears in the anthologies The Best American Poetry 2000, And We the Creatures, and The POETRY Anthology, 1912-2002 as well as the textbook Literature and the Writing Process, 5th/6th eds. He grew up in New Jersey, and was educated at Cornell University and the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. He lives in Los Angeles, where he works as a technical writer for an aerospace research group.