Finelines Summer 2004

  Grapes, Raisins, Wine and Tears

(Benjamin Graber is a fiction writer who live in Omaha, NE)




My love is like a grape. That figures. That’s what I was bound to come up with.

Someone good with words would say a rose, or maybe a cherry. What pops into your mind? How can anyone wax romantic about a grape?

Whaddya going to do, Einstein, talk about walking around smashing them with your feet, feeling the gushing oozing feeling between your toes just like the sand of the beach that you walk on together as the surf crashes loudly around you, like in From Here to Eternity, splashing the water against her dress, making it cling to that unforgettable body that haunts your memory?

Right, see how you are. Just when you might have fooled someone into believing you, you leave a hint of melancholy. Wonderful with words, terrible with love. Sounds like a parable or maybe the story of your life. A grape, you say? What is it about a grape that brings out passion? Have you ever peeled off the skin of a grape in your mouth, rolled it around with your tongue, felt its soft compliance slip around inside of you, taste one drop at time the sweetness that is the mother of the vine, the nectar of love and craziness, then when you can’t stand it any longer sink your teeth into its pulpy, slightly stringy form, and let it slide down your throat as you consume it into you, absorb it, become one with ... a grape?

Certainly you jest with me, make a mockery of love. You who would let the fruit rot on the vine rather than bottle it and preserve it. You who view any encasement not as commitment but as confinement. You talk about grapes and love when in truth all you know of is sour and bitter, avoidance and excuses. How can you let them think you are a warm, compassionate, giving lover? One who would lift the cup to your beloved, hold it to her lips, let the drop of the fruit of the grape touch the tip of her tongue, glisten in expectation that you will fulfill her dreams, fill her with the future, make her a woman, a wife, a mother, a grandmother. Stay with her for the whole of your life. The grape will not reach that fullness with you; she needs to know that, she has known it. She has seen that with you the grape turns not into wine, does not flower, but becomes wrinkled into a raisin, a different kind of fruit, one that does not have the same round beauty that eludes you because you only know one way, your way, and there you go again.

Try, you say? There is no trying, there is only doing, and you are not capable and not because you are not a poet, not because the first word that came to you was a grape. No, it’s because you are a small little boy who will never take that risk. You'll talk about it, joke about it, even rhyme about it. But when the time comes to let it ripen, to hold it as if your life depends on it, all you will see is the grape, and you will lose her to the one who knows that love is a grape, a flower, a concept, and a state of being that is beyond your wandering ways.

So drink your cup of grape, roll your skinned passionate taste around in your mouth, and say good-bye to her for she has gone to another, one who doesn’t philosophize about grapes, roses, or cherries. One who cherishes her and takes her home to stay.

And all I have left is my words, my cute metaphors, and my tears.