There Are Poems, and Then There Are Poems About Oranges

I've been fascinated by poems about oranges for years. They're hard to write, even though I find oranges themselves to be deeply alluring fruits. What is it? Their bright color? Their nearly spherical shape, closer to perfection than any other naturally occurring fruit? How they are contained, the nubbed and protective peel that hides a buffer of soft, white tissue, a translucent web to keep each slice in place, the long, glistening bundles of juice? Or is it simply the taste and texture, so wet and sweet and tangy, more refreshing than water straight from a spring? Sometimes I think it's how self-contained an orange is, how designed it seems to be with its protective peel, its even wedges that cleave perfectly each to each, the way each slice narrows down to a fine edge that kisses all the others.

Whatever the appeal (gah!) of oranges may be, I can never seem to write about them, or at least to write about them in a way that pleases me. This leads me to several conclusions: 1) I'm not yet a good enough poet to decipher and express the true nature of an orange, and so I will have to try again tomorrow. 2) Oranges are mystical in nature, if not downright zen. 3) There is something necessary about making attempts on mysteries, something important about plumbing the space between that which what one intuits and what one can actually know. And so oranges keep on tempting me, and I keep on writing my drafts.

This poem is not technically about oranges, but it says something about the way this whole writing thing works.


Why I Am Not a Painter
Frank O'Hara

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.