~ after Li-Young Lee In another land, I used to know you only in one form— drenched in syrup, packed 6-8 halves to a can; unnatural gold, firm at first to the bite, tufted cup sometimes still faintly rouged with pink where hands pried the pit loose in a factory, perhaps somewhere in the south where I now live. But I never knew the way light fell through orchards at dusk or dawn, how the smells of ripening mingled with dust, or if every fruit picker in this country still looks like me. I read a Chinese folk tale of a boatman who lost his way and wound up in a village fenced from time, suspended in peach blossoms— The story says, everyone who forgets what such happiness is like, loses the chance to be immortal. I also know a poem that gave me a peach before I ever bit into the actual flesh of one: that traced its provenance before a boy at a roadside stand dropped them, still warm from the sun, into a paper bag. And thus I learned how words, too, conjure the same sugar and skin, how they dapple in both shadow and sunlight. As for what is impossible and what we find we can hold in our hands, it's still a kind of sweetness, tasting the gift which comes from seed we did not sow ourselves.
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