When I see a melon on the table glinting

in the morning light, why does my heart leap up,

go out to it as it does?  Why do I want

to sketch this melon, put it down in words,

or set it down in short melodic phrases?

 

It can never come closer to me than it is now,

at this moment when I see it before me

on the table like some small world I dreamt

as a child in my sandbox of dreams,

and seeing it as this world, I am taken by it,

 

possessed by it as surely as the spring

takes the elm, thawing it until the winter

is nothing in its life, until the skin

of leaves it’s lost is nothing.  I become

the melon’s then, exist only to admire

 

its beauty, its lime white skin and cold sweetness,

its Bethlehem and Golgotha, exist only to admire

its otherness, and see my self a part from it,

never closer to it than I am now, never freer

than now of my own place of skulls.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Sh4rp_i