In Short, a Memory of the Other on a Good Day, 1
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- Category: Excerpts from Our Books
- Published: Tuesday, 04 March 2014 21:58
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Much Better, Schreiner
The skin of an apricot
is alive
as a skinned knee a mother must wash,
the raw patch, the tears she loves
and weeps to see and weeps to see
no more, the child grown and reaching
the age of forgetting.
This box of apricots
from Saudi Arabia I lifted up
to my nose and from the golden
dust came the sun
on warm skin. Is it possible
to be as tender as they are,
so that rubbing against one another
as they begin to soften means
some skin comes off as it does from your palm
when you have raked leaves all day?
In the evening, taking your hand
in your hand, or if lucky
in another's hand, see beneath
the peel of us the red membrane
of the scraped knee or the grazed
knuckle as you make supper,
ticklish as the lip to the tip
of another's tongue. But it does not open,
really, until you part it aside
at the seam where it has been sewn
while it played in the wind
on the lifted bough and green waxy leaves.
Isn't it unlike you—how unlikely
after all, to tease an apricot
in the middle of the afternoon
in the workplace 6000 miles
from the woman they remind you of.