Tomatoes Misused, Reused, and Ogled.

I got major tomatoes and zookeeny, tell you what. Never have so many vegetables been squeezed out of so little unpromising-looking dirt, whether by skill or by natural fecundity or by shear dumb dint of labor. Basically what you got is a springtime of heretofore unprecedented raininess, followed by several weeks of hot sun of the direct yellow variety, during which yours truly applied some unrepeatable perfect mix of tapwater, horse dooky, composted lawn clippings, kitchen scraps, and good wishes. The assembled ghosts of all the deceased migliore fabbri are looking over my sunburned shoulders this year silently cheering me on and high-fiving my repeated fortuitous accidents of impeccable plant husbandry. I cannot take even a sidelong glance out my rear window in the general direction of the vegetables without a two-pound brandywine crashing through the downright Brazilian canopy of verdure and into the bleeding morass of her saucy big sisters. You called them once 'misused tomatoes' in that chapbook of lovely sonnets and I have ever since seen in a high-summer garden all the May planting and August sticky waste as a story about a marriage getting so ripe it falls. Not to say that you could ever pick a tomato at its moment of perfection, right at the fulcrum of coltish girlishness and curvy womanliness, not more nor less but right at the very moment, and keep it that way forever. Pretty soon it's going to sag and sadly smoosh and gravitize a cloud of little flies and then you're going to set it on the counter to admire for maybe two days, max, before you put it in the compost so it can make a more lissome tomato next year, or maybe a zookeeny.

That bit about the compost: that's what I thought the moment I read you mention the bit about how we are just a temporary vortex of chemicals, some coming some going, and it won't last. That's a hopeful and happy-making thought when you look at my garden this year and the way it seems so skillful and intentional and artlike though what it is actually is: a coincidence of fortuitous circumstances and me standing there trying not to breathe so the tomatoes don't fall.