Grape to Raisin

Dear Kate,

I've been pondering on this: how does a grape turn into a raisin, the meaty, watery, and until-no-more fact of life, before it is a metaphor?

It might have to do with me having gone to a memorial service this past Saturday, or the look of a man about my age playing with his cellphone, his balding top facing me, when and where the gods came out to play around him, or generally the efflorescence and shriveling of everything, not necessarily in that order.

How many types of raisin are there?  At least two that I suppose you know of: the purple, harder and desiccated kind that even with a vigorous imagination you can't quite restore to its former glory, and the green, juicer kind, like a just deflated balloon that a buffoon would see the possibility to resuscitate.

Naturally we think they are made from different types of grape.  Just as naturally and frequently, we are wrong.  They are both made from the same seedless green grapes.  The different colors come from the way we dry the same grape: naturally under the sun for about 3 weeks for living green to turn dead purple, or using a dehydrator and sulfur dioxide for green to turn greener—golden, in less than a day.  Some people are allergic to gold, because of the chemical artificially used.

Go have a field day with the prosaic facts, make poetry out of the dying and the dead.  Make sure to write yourself into it—which is to say to write honestly and face the demons we can't quite purge with the spew of words.  I personally don't know what to make of all these, other than the most obvious: in our grasp of reason to turn grape into raisin, the day our imagination dithers is the day we wither.

Just because it rhymes doesn't make it poetry.

Yours, Alex