O woody apostrophe! To what may you be likened? Tiny fossilized boxing glove, punching way above your weight. Little flaxen kidney, sieving the wheat from the chaff. Your gentle hippocampal curve suggests a seahorse clasping a thin, dendritic frond. Dense, delectable crescent—the rhyme and reason everything resembles something else. From the Portuguese caju, from the Tupian acajú, meaning ‘the nut that produces itself.’
Click here to read James Geary on the origin of the poem.
Image by Anton Shuvalov on unsplash.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
James Geary:
I love the metaphysical poets, a group that for me includes historical figures like John Donne but also contemporary writers like Kay Ryan. I love how the poet’s attention transforms a physical thing—a flea bite, for example, or rummaging through a drawer in search of a lost item—into a metaphysical fable, activating all kinds of unexpected psychological, emotional and spiritual associations. I also love cashews, and when I learned about the word’s etymology I knew the cashew was an ideal object of contemplation. So I paid attention to the cashew and tried to describe what I saw, riffing on the images it evoked. Writing is always double. Descriptions are both literally and metaphorically true. The procedure requires of both writer and reader an identical ability to see resemblances. Method and meaning are the same. Process is also product. That’s why a poem is a thing that produces itself.
James Geary is the author of Wit’s End: What Wit Is, How It Works, and Why We Need It; I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World; and the New York Times bestseller The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism, among other books. University of Chicago Press will publish a new edition of The World in a Phrase in 2025.
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