Birds Purple and Blackberry Blue

Birds Purple and Blackberry Blue / 
Swashed still purple / 
And black to be / 
Enmeshed in fields of Summerly. / 

An old woman now,
Lost in the memory gardens
Of thorn and sticker
And a once young lover's pain,

Her blooms in wait
To taste tart sweet verjuice,
The black and purpleberry

Toes pressed and curled,
Wreathed and twined,
Into moist Pacific loam,

And the silted sand dunes
Along the firth and quay
Of the sacred lands
Of the Duwamish,

Now embraced against the cold to come
When Autumn damp danks the air
And Winter icings freeze the fountainheads
Of Lilac and the Sugar Berries
Of forbidden fruit...