Let the beauty we love be what we do.
—Rumi
Sometimes after blanching
the skin peels right off the peach.
It takes only a few minutes
for the naked fruit to glisten,
produce its own coat of sheen.
Slippery and lovely,
if you’ve ever held one,
they wear the same fire
as their skin. Some years,
there are no peaches. Frost
in the buds or the blossoms.
The orchard is a sad place, then.
But this peach, this Rosa,
lustrous and falling out of its skin,
was lucky as I am lucky tonight
to be alive, lucky to be turning the peach
in my hands, slicing into its flesh,
cleaving the halves from the dark red pit
with all the beauty I can muster.
“…with all the beauty I can muster.” All the beauty you can muster with your slicing; and also all the tangible beauty you can muster/handle, laying naked and fiery glistening, there in your hands.
Why look like a canned fruit, in this orchard of God?
I was canning fruit! So pretty in its jars now, golden on the shelves, jars of sunshine and August and love from the man who grew them.
I meant the grocery-shelved tin-canned stuff—not the a-whisper’s-breath-from-off-the-tree mason-jarred (and we still call it, “canning”) elegance.
So not the same things, nor even the same species, those two extremes.
Wow, that’s a big step toward the heart at the end. It’s so surface for over half, the sheen and all, but the cleaving and the dark red pit work so well in pushing past the pretty to the more passionate.