Oranges

There once lived an artist
who spent forty years paying homage to
oranges. She sculpted them, painted
them, wood and bronze, oil and
pastel; when she grew tired of that she
took a junkyard typewriter and some library books
and cobbled together poems about them,
their bumpy rough skins, their soft inner
fruit-meat overflowing with sour-sweet
juice. She won many accolades
for her work. The sensitivity of her brushstrokes
did not go unrecognized. But no one understood—
still the question hung in the air
at every gallery reception, every poetry reading—
why oranges?

Some disdained her seeming obsession:
it was, after all, just a fruit. Others
thought her presumptuous for daring to think
she’d more to say about oranges
than the orange trees themselves; the trees
were, after all, the ones who grew the fruit,
guarded it with their dark green leaves.
And she was just an artist.
Shouldn’t it be enough, such critics said,
to regard each year’s orange harvest
with a wondering eye, to take in
the smell that hovers sticky in the summer air,
write an ode or draw a little picture—just once—
and move on? Why dedicate forty years
to oranges?

When interviewed, the artist could offer
no satisfying answer. All of her reasons were bad.
The way the afternoon sun illuminated
the walls of her house—all orange—
was not a good enough reason.
The way a wasp might settle on a ripening orange,
its helicopter wings still, its military face peaceful,
wasn’t a good reason either.
The way a wooden stepladder looked
propped up against an orange tree
was most incomprehensible of all.
No matter. The artist kept on painting,
every day immortalizing in a million
different shades untold baskets
of oranges.

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