FoodSexLit

Spring has come early to Seattle this year, and first to bloom are the cherry trees.

After staring at the naked limbs of trees all winter, this sudden riotous blossoming of the cherry trees carries the fragrance of sex.

If you watch a cherry tree, very carefully, you can see each tree’s exact moment of perfection—the day when the throat of each delicate blossom is completely open— when each bough carries an abundance of flowers at their most flush, most full.

What I love is how the trees give themselves over to their blooming; they are immersed in it completely, fully, the way the human body gives itself to orgasm.

Poets, the chroniclers of love, sex, and desire, have long tried to capture this sex-essence of cherry trees in bloom using metaphor.  Take this line from W.H. Auden:

“Loveliest of trees, the cherry now/ is hung with bloom along the bough . . .”

At first glance, first read, the poem might not seem very exciting—definitely not erotic.  But the poem’s music is powerful: if you can “hear with eyes,” (to borrow a line from Shakespeare), you will start to experience the sensuality of the lines.

Allow me to lead you into the gutter.

The poem’s most powerful way of making music is its strongly rhythmic meter– it thrusts certain words at you:

Say it with me: LOVE-liest of  TREES the CHERRY NOW/ is HUNG with BLOOM a LONG the BOUGH.

If you pay attention to the “important” words, the words the music of the poem thrusts at you, you will begin to not just hear the images with your eyes, you will begin to feel the poem’s less innocent narrative:

Love

cherry

tree

now

hung

bloom

long

bough

Sort of like a haiku, eh?

One of my favorite film theory terms is fabula– basically, the story a viewer constructs from the images he/she sees.  So say you watch a man and a woman kissing, there’s a fadeout, and then the next shot is the two sitting on opposite ends of a couch.  She’s buttoning her blouse—he’s smoking what seems to be an unusually long cigarette.  What do you think happened?

By the way, that’s Double Indemnity, and I saw it for the first time when I was co-teaching a film class.  I was blown away by the phallic imagery in that particular scene.  The way script writers got around those censors . . .

Anyway, here’s the images as I see them and my particular fabula:

The poem alludes to the urgency of the sex act.  NOW.  Both lovers experience physical arousal before/during/after as their two bodies “bloom.”  There are clearly references to the male sex organs: “hung,” “long,” and “bough.”

The actual fruit, the cherry, connotes not just virginity (and not just the first-first time, but also the first time any couple makes love for the first time) and the delicate engorging of a woman’s sex organs.

To put it bluntly: it’s their first time, she is like a flower, the lover is hung, one or both of them bloom in orgasm, and he has a long, um, “bough.”

And as one more way to hear with our eyes, let’s talk about assonance: the repetition of vowel sounds.  The poem also makes the sounds of sex: the poems murmur “uh,” “ooooo,” and “ah.”

Observe:

“Uh” — “l (uh) veliest,” “of,” “the,” and “hung”

“Ooooo” — “bloom”

“Ah” in “along”

Note: The “ow” in “bough” and “now” is a little disturbing.  For now, I’ll say that sex, at its best, might involve a little pain.  But I’ll save my thoughts on this for a blog posting on duende.

I want to end now, however, with another poem about cherry trees in bloom.  It’s a line from a poem by Pablo Neruda, called “Every Day You Play,” and it concludes with this line:

“I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.”

Try THAT pick-up line the next time you want to get laid.

Happy Spring, everyone.  I wish you all much love, cherries, blossoms, and multiple bloomings.   And, for those of you so inclined, a long bough or two.