For R.C.
At the market we’d bought a pomegranate,
weighed its cheeks in rubies for luck.
I set my knife to halve it, kneeling in the grass
between red leaves, but you tell me
to let the last hours of the year go in peace–
no sacrifice would convince any god
to stop the season from dying.
With a surgeon’s hands, you carve away
the crown, then etch the fruit
into sections that you fan out
over my handkerchief. Second by second,
the arils pebble the pink paisley unbled
while first-grade you-and-I
laugh in the distance, our heads
thrown back on tire swings: backward,
forward-backward, lower, lower-faster.
When the last aril falls, you say
you won’t be gone for long
and tread to the horizon, quietly
among these thousand breaths still burning,
where you turn and blow out
a single maple leaf. It hesitates until you
close your mouth, and then, rolling through
the air, goes to join the rest of the sky.
Click here to read Katherine Huang on the origin of the poem.
Image: “Pomegranate” by Jannes Pockele, licensed under CC 2.0.
