1.
I was eating plums when she called me to her room. She couldn’t
stop stealing the vodka from the freezer in the dead of night. I held her as she
cried little blueberries onto me, staining my shirt. I made fruit salad for us.
In went the smooth cubed mangos, the slippery peaches, the nectarines, and the
velvet plums. Out came a bruised sunset of her pain and it washed over me. We
stayed up all night talking, and consumed the fruit amalgam on her threadbare
couch like children, lying on our tummies, heads curiously resting on hands. We
stared with child-like innocence, watching the sun come up in the slow glory
splash of fruit salad colors. First we had fruit, and then we had ourselves. It
was time to grow up.
2.
“What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked
down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at
the full moon. In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the
neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations! What peaches and what
penumbra! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in
the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!—and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you
doing down by the watermelons?” (Allen
Ginsberg)
3.
Walking to the green-awninged Latino Farmer’s Market on French
Street, I have many thoughts of you, Allen Ginsberg, I collect forty pounds of
fruit; four bunches of bananas, eight golden delicious apples, three
pomegranates, two mangos, two grapefruit, four oranges, a pineapple, a quarter
of a watermelon, eight red plums, eight kiwis, three persimmons and five
vine-ripened tomatoes. Slithering exhaustedly onto the bench on my porch, I
catch my breath from the walk and feel rich. Lighter than gold, easier to hold,
let the taste unfold! Upstairs, I arrange, I refrigerate, I contemplate my fate
and create a fruit plate. I will have two golden delicious.
4.
But the persimmon?! “Diospyros kaki,
the Asian persimmon, in the family Ebenaceae. In many cultivars,
known as the astringent varieties, the fruit has a high proanthocyanidin-type tannin content which makes the immature fruit astringent and bitter. The tannin levels are reduced as the fruit matures. It is not
edible in its crisp, firm state but has its best flavor when allowed to rest
and soften after harvest. It has a soft jelly-like consistency and is best
eaten with a spoon.” Spoon! It is orange, gelatinous and of a mango-ish
consistency and it is mine. I get juice and pulp all over my face, and it drips
from my mouth like blood would from a wolf’s jaw, hunched over his kill after a
long hunt. I imagine myself as a hunter-gatherer. I yearn for the simplicity of
tending the earth, of harvest and of fullness, rainbow gems of fruit to gather.
First having fruit, and then having myself.
5.
No one ever called me fruity, but as a child, I lifted the
brightly stained petticoats of strawberries, peered into their pink, trying to
grasp their seeds. I lusted after my friends’ straw-colored ponytails and I
unzipped my rubber peach in exploration of confusing juices. Who were these
girls with their ripeness who I grew up with? We burst together, from nubbed
and firm to pink and fleshy. We dropped our monthly seed for the first time,
like so much strawberry jam and the boys cried when their bright emerald
bananas hardened so fast, they turned yellow, burst at the seams and blasted
little fibers everywhere before softening once again. Before anyone knew what
was happening, we were all exchanging pollen in the same parks and playgrounds
we had once traversed while young and unripe.
6.
Hippocrates once said “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be
thy food” That is what fruit, women, men, genitalia, poetry, all are to me. I
take it all in, I breathe, swallow, I roll my eyes back in pleasure and I bask
in the healing power of what is Natural. I hear the sticky fructose pounding at
the back of my throat, that spoonful of fruit sugar to help the medicine go
down, the seductress Strawberry is beckoning to me and I will drown. So give me
over to the slow glory splash of fruit salad colors. First I had fruit, and
then I had myself.
7.
After I have myself, I stumble into glass man. I watch him melt
glass, hot under two blowtorches. Propane and oxygen swirling cobalt, crimson,
pale fire. The blowtorches make a swooshing sound as this transparent man bends
over them with mirrored glasses. He protects his eyes the way I protect my
heart. He holds a thin rod of jade in his right hand and plunges it softly into
the bulb sprouting at the end of the rod that he turns in his left hand. The
bulb is clear and perfectly spherical, like a gigantic droplet of water. He
pricks the glass on itself again and again, enormous hands doing impossibly
small things. He smooshes the pinpricks of jade against a block of graphite
until they have pushed themselves up inside of the clear bulb. I am watching a
flower bloom in reverse. It is seeds wriggling into ovules, sexual as hell. I
am watching the pollination of a fruit-bearing plant.
8.
Glass man buys the colored rods of glass by the pound. He tells me
some of their names: bippityboppityblue, blue stardust, raindrop, mantis green,
honeybadger, andromeda, halfblood, peacock, chameleon, oil slick, dwarf white,
blue aventurine, pink cadillac, steel wool.
9.
Then he gets to the good stuff: wisteria purple, passion pink,
sangria red, lemondrop, tangie, exotic grapefruit, dense kiwi, penumbra. What peaches and what
penumbra! The glass looks
like fruit. I giggle into his plaid shirt. He tells me there are solid kinds
and transparent kinds of glass. I slide my cold fingers under his shirt, he
feels solid and warm. He tells me he believes in transparency. But people
always talk about cold glass and glass breaking. So I protect my heart the way
he protects his eyes.
9.
Glass man explains
the coefficient of expansion, the rate at which glass expands for each degree
of temperature increase. He tells me this coefficient is different for every
color –for instance, it is 33 for clear glass and 28 for jade glass, which is
close enough that they can fuse easily. He says to think of two kinds of glass
with vastly different densities as if they are ice and Jell-O –they will both
melt at different rates so they cannot fuse together easily, they'll slip and break. This makes me think of how different types of food require different
enzymes to be digested by the stomach. For optimal digestion, fruit should be
eaten alone. This is not a lonely thought. No, it is all about compatibility.
Solitude is loneliness with a problem. So what does togetherness look like when
two people value solitude? What color is it? What density is it? People always
talk about cold glass and the sound of glass breaking. But now I want to know
what it sounds like when hot glass fuses. I want to eat fruit off a glass plate
made of that sound, those colors. I want to eat the glass plate too. I want a
lot of things, but I can’t tell fruit apart from glass. Would it really hurt if
I just took a fistful of dense kiwi and swallowed it?
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