I think I'll just read a handful more and a new poem.
I mentioned in my class visit today
that I was encouraged by the person the poet,
the dear friend to whom I dedicate this book, Mary Jo
Bang, that I take out a poem that
was in the earlier manuscript.
It was a poem that was not written in 20 lines,
and she thought you should just really restrict it to 20 lines,
although there is one that's in 24.
And so I said, well, I will take that poem out,
but I better write a new one.
And that day, someone from the Shanghai Botanical Garden
reached out to me and asked me to write a poem
about a piece of fruit, and this not-- that I thought that that
was a great coincidence.
It seemed like kismet, and so I did.
I wrote-- and I had also very recently encountered
a peach of some import.
And-- when I was back up in Rhode Island,
it was covered in more peach fuzz than you've ever seen.
I'm not sure if this is typical for peaches
when they're growing on their own
before they make their way to market.
This was covered in like cotton floss.
This was weird and bit a little bit off putting,
but I still went for it.
And here's a poem called "To Eat a Peach."
And I swear to you I did not have Prufrock
in mind, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,
when called upon to eat a peach.
No one should believe me, but it is true
and I embrace the fact that it does
seem like I'm acknowledging, "do I dare to eat a peach?"
And this is called "To Eat a Peach."
Time is so hard to fathom, maybe I knew
what I was doing all along.
"To Eat a Peach."
One day I won't react when called
by name or to the light slap on the cheek
to break me from the sleep that isn't sleep.
I will be still, and yet I won't.
One night my living feet will graze the floor
like ducks across a pond one final time
and lift off into the dark of anyone's guess.
Somewhere a word is waiting to be the last I speak.
It might be I used it in passing today.
It might be I'm using it now.
We know this all too well--
all things end, and each specifically as this peach
picked at an orchard days ago, skin shaggy as a lagomorph.
You have to rub it off under cold running water
before you'd ever dream of eating it.
In all cases, there's a peach that's
closer to where you are than all other peaches.
Reach out and take it before what's next.
Who's been ripening in a brown paper bag?
We all have.
Isolating, solving for X. I worry the divots mark places
where the flesh has succumbed to catastrophe,
but they surprise me every time, almost like sunset,
or like a wellness center I enter through my mouth,
till I'm right in the middle of the last peach of a season
thick with peaches--
its juice ridiculous in rivers down
my chin, liturgy of almond pushed
through plush walls of mango--
and in the heaven of it, I don't even know who I am.