Early Cascade by Lucia Perillo Poem Analysis

📌Category: Poems
📌Words: 1309
📌Pages: 5
📌Published: 19 January 2022

Upon receiving and skimming the poem “Early Cascade” by Lucia Perillo, I was unsure of what the poem was trying to convey. The ambiguity of the poem’s simple language and lack of context blurred my general understanding of the poem itself. How was I supposed to understand and present the connection between loneliness and tomatoes? How was I supposed to convey the complex emotion of loneliness in a poem that consists of only 7 sentences? After doing a few through reads and consulting other classmates, I was able to come up with an interpretation for the poem. “Early Cascade” begins with the speaker saying they “couldn’t have waited”, showing us that there is a sense of urgency or excitement right away. They exclaim that by waiting any longer for someone, it would’ve resulted in something, perhaps some fruit, rotting on a vine. This sparked some interest in me considering that the process for fruit to rot can take weeks, not a few moments, implying that maybe this person has slowly lost the context of time. This line also gives us the idea that the setting of this poem could be in a garden considering the harvesting of the fruit. Then, the speaker takes one of the fruits off the vine, a tomato, and begins to describe how it is prepared and its characteristics such as the skin and taste. The tomato is cut into parts and salted, the skin of the tomato described as being “mealy” or having a gritty texture and the stem of the tomato made the speaker’s throat feel “dusty” and “warm” upon swallowing it, indicating that the tomato looks good. Suddenly, the speaker spits out the pieces of tomato in their mouth. They begin to exclaim in an angry manner that the tomato seems too sweet, saying they could’ve gagged from how sweet it was. They say, the miser is accused by her red sums, which the word is miser means a person who hoards wealth and doesn’t spend it. These two lines could imply that the speaker compares the tomato to a miser, in which the tomato keeps all its sweetness and good things to itself instead of giving some of those good things to our speaker. The speaker continues to say how they would’ve rather “eaten the dirt itself” than to eat this tomato and feel this loneliness. Normally, they aren’t aware of how lonely they are but, on this particular night, when they tried this tomato, they felt an extreme loneliness engulfing them completely. 

Once I fully understood the meaning and contents of the poem, my next task was to think about who the speaker was and who are they were speaking to. In the process of committing this poem to memory, as I was reading the poem, I could almost begin to envision the scene I wanted to perform. There was a woman with long black hair and freckles on her face. She was short and looked like a ghost at times with her pale skin, sunken sad eyes and sadness in her tone. She wasn’t always like this though; she had a husband who she loved very much but sadly he passed away due to having stage 4 cancer. A year before his passing, they decided to make a little garden on the balcony of their apartment. They spent as much time as they could in that garden and grew many things like cucumbers, peppers, and tomatoes. Every harvest season since his death, when the crops would begin to grow, she would remember the promise she made to her husband to take care of the garden and remember him. At the time of the poem, it is the year anniversary of her husband’s death, the fruits are beginning to grow and of those fruits, the tomatoes are ready to be picked. She visits this garden late at night and looks at one of the first tomatoes coming in. She talks out loud to herself, almost as if she was hoping that her husband can hear her. She takes one of the tomatoes inside, cuts it up into multiple pieces, adds some salt to it, and lastly puts it in her mouth. She describes the taste and texture of the tomato, comparing it to the ones they grew last year, the last tomatoes they grew together. This is supposed to be a big moment for her because it’s the first fruit she’s trying from their garden since his passing, yet, as she’s chewing the piece of the tomato and thinking about its taste and the memories shared with her husband, she suddenly spits out the tomato piece into her sink. She comes out of this denial state and becomes sad and angry upon realizing that her husband is really gone. She claims that the tomato is so good but it’s unbearable to enjoy without her husband there to enjoy it with her, acknowledging that she has been denying his passing and wasn’t allowing herself to grieve which is not what he would’ve wanted. She’s mad and yelling with tears in her eyes but knows that this won’t help her. She accepts her loneliness and lets it consume her in the end, hoping that one day she can be free from her pain and loneliness.  

When it was my turn to perform my poem, I was terrified. Could I be able to portray my story in a way that it makes sense? Would the audience understand what I was trying to do without needing the backstory I came up with? As I went up in front of the audience and looked at everyone there, I tired my best to embody the woman I imagined, her denial, her anger, her pain. I set my prop down, a bright read tomato laying on the grown, and set myself into position. I started by entering the scene by yawning, indicating that it was nighttime based on the line that says, “on this the first night in my life”. I walked to center stage and began reciting my lines. Upon reaching the line “So I cut the first tomato into eighths”, I picked up my tomato and pretended to cut it up and salt it as well. When I reached the line “or bitter,” I had forgotten the order of the words for the next line and instead of wasting any time and still maintaining the same energy of the scene, I called for the line. After the line “that made my throat feel dusty and warm”, I took a pause to look that the tomato and pretended to cut it, season it, and took a “bite”. As I pretended to chew the tomato and portrayed the woman’s realization of not having her husband there with my facial expressions, I spit the “pieces” on the ground. This received a few reactions from the audience such as gasping or the raising of eyebrows as if it was unexpected. I began the rest of the lines in an angrier tone. At the line “Better had I eaten the dirt itself”, I began to show my defeat with loneliness and sadness by slowing down my words and speaking in a sadder tone, as well as embodying that emotion by slowing getting on my knees. With my last line “at last, it comes”, I made sure to take a pause between the two parts and after saying the last word, I put my head in my hands to show my sadness but also the acceptance of loneliness taking over. I kept that moment lingering for a few beats after getting up and exiting the stage. If I were to reperform this scene again, I would better organize my prop in order to properly show me looking at the other fruits in the garden and actually picking the tomato off the vine. I would also practice my lines a little bit better because even though I did know the line, my nerves caused me to forget the order of the words in that line. I was proud of myself for stepping out of my comfort zone and putting my all into this performance, considering I don’t have any theater experience I still managed to beat my own expectations. Now that I know what it feels like to be up there on stage and perform, I can’t wait to see how well I can do for the next performances.

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