Wedding Night: We Share an Heirloom Tomato on Our Hotel Balcony Overlooking the Ocean in Which Natalie Wood Drowned Poem by Anna Journey

for David

We imagine Natalie held a gelatinous green
sliver on her tongue, that its watery

disk caught the lamplight before
she slipped from her yacht

to drown in the waves off this island. This was
thirty years ago. And our tomato's strain

stretches back decades, to an heirloom seed
saved before either of us was born,

before Natalie's elbow
brushed the clouded jade

face of the ancestral fruit
in a Catalina stand, before she handed it

to her husband, saying, This one. We hover
near the plate, where the last

half of our shadowed tomato
sits in its skin's deep pleats. I lean

toward you to trace each
salted crease with a thumbnail—

brined and wild as those lines
clawed in the green

side of the yacht's
rubber dinghy. Those lingering

shapes the coroner found—the drowned
actress's scratch marks. That night

we first met, I had another lover
but you didn't

care. My Bellini's peach puree,
our waiter said, had sailed across

the Atlantic, from France. It swirled
as I sipped and sank

to the glass bottom
of my champagne flute. You whispered,

Guilt is the most
useless emotion. After Natalie rolled

into the waves, the wet feathers
of her down coat wrapped

their white anchors
at her hips. This was 1981. I turned

a year old that month and somewhere
an heirloom seed

washed up. You felt an odd breeze
knock at your elbow as I took

my first step. We hadn't yet met.
Tonight, we watch the wet date palms tip

toward the surf and, curling,
swallow their tongues.