Ripe Cherries Poem by Stefan Hertmans

What holds on is inedible.
The oldest houses are exchanged for newer rubble,
and smooth stone reaches out to older rubble.

But I have Under Milk Wood in the room
and Richard Burton who, like a drunk
sleeping with his arch-mother in his dream,
sells fortune-telling on record.

He dreams her twentytwo
and naked under a wide black dress,
her legs tanned from working in an inaccesible field.
Her white breasts he weighs on his one hand,
while flexing her small wet body with the other.

They're spraying the streets against the heat, even at ten
in the morning.

I bought cherries, I rinse them with cool water
and put the glass bowl on the granite table
in the scorched garden.

At night it gets even warmer,
the tiles lie in blazing rows on the roof
and radiate down into the rooms where we lie
and listen to how the other one sleeps.

Neither of us sleeps.
I hear you sighing, half asleep, louder and regular.
I think I can make out my name. For a moment,
a moment in between, the landing
is as cool as water at my feet.

Your door is open. The window is open.
In the heat you lie open on the bedspread.
When I, two hours later, go back upstream,
you've dropped off already. The first light sees the
intimate glint we leave behind there together.

I bought cherries.
A young woman gave me two for sampling in my hand;
I weighed them with a small gesture and stared at her
for a long time. Then her pupils dilated.
With black cherries she saw me.

I bought the full pound of her,
flung the stones I licked clean into the bed
on which, laughing in sweat, you said something about ripe
cherries.

The roots in the roof-gutter, years from then,
feed on the rubble you and I shed,
a small tree 'deeply trimmed and giddy,
love', as the old poet said.

It only blooms in December, when blossoms come from heaven,
cold and shivery as a ballerina in her first springtide.

We have time.
Tonight, when heat falls down on us again from the eaves,
I let you listen to Under Milkwood.
We lie there, with bodies open as ears,
chanting love and sweat.

Translation: Peter Nijmeijer