I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black
blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black
art
of blackberry-making; and as I
stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth,
the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain
peculiar words
like strengths and squinched,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open,
and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black
language
of blackberry-eating in late September.