From Blossoms

(Apples, Peaches, Pears, and Grapes by Paul
Cézanne, 1839-1906, French Post-Impressionist
painter)

“Give me Books, fruit, French wine and fine whether [sic] and a little music out of doors, played by somebody I do not know . . . and I can pass a summer very quietly without caring much about Fat Louis, fat Regent or the Duke of Wellington,” wrote John Keats to his sister Fanny, on August 28, 1819. “I should like now to promenade round you[r] Gardens — apple tasting — pear tasting — plum judging — apricot nibbling — peach scrunching — Nectarine-sucking and Melon carving.”

FROM BLOSSOMS

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

~ Li-Young Lee, American poet born 1957 in Indonesia to Chinese parents after they fled political turmoil in China