Some days I’m all apple --
shiny-skinned and proper,
bursting with tart-laced sweetness.
And sometimes I’m secretly afraid of apples --
You can never quite predict
what they’ll do to your mouth
(or how the world will love you).
Other days I’m decidedly orange --
thick-skinned and pulpy and scurvy-allaying,
durable, throwable, quenching.
Have you ever eaten an orange
after rolling, squeezing, beating it
down so it’s more like a juice box
than fruit?
Sometimes I secretly like them this way.
I am rarely a cherry but often pistachio --
you can guess for yourself what that’s all about,
though I feel right at home in spumoni.
My blackberry season's a hot blue mess, and
on banana days I can barely focus --
longingly dreaming of peanut butter.
Most days I seem to be smaller than a breadbox,
But on good days I sense something more.
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself;
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)*
I am also the blades in the tallgrass meadow,
the honey in the hive made of thistles’ lovesong,
the falcon’s talon made of mouse heart and bone.
And as well I'm the blade that trims your lawn
and the fences that cut through our earthen skin
separating what’s yours and what’s mine.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall….
Good fences make good neighbors.**
So today I’m an apple and tomorrow I won’t eat it,
and I torture my oranges for the pleasure of pulp.
And today I’m a poet and tomorrow I’ll hate it —
how I lock up these words in this written cage
in the hope that they’ll marshall some jailbreaks.
Perhaps originality is itself the original sin
(Not the woman, the fig, or either’s desire).
All the true things have been said before,
and the rest is a matter of sensing. But
We shall not cease from exploration
And at the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started…***
So today I’m an apple, and I’m hoping
you’ll eat me, though tomorrow’s walnut
may hide in her shell.
And I’d like, some day, to be
a pomegranate seed
simply glowing in a bowl full of family.
---
*Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself", Leaves of Grass.
** Robert Frost, “Mending Wall”, The Poetry of Robert Frost.
*** T.S. Eliot, [Quartet 4, part V], The Four Quartets.