Eclogue 8: Standby

At the base of the navel

she pierces the rind of the orange

with her thumbnail,

slices out an equator

by turning the fruit and the nail

in opposite arcs, as if

she is calibrating

a sextant to measure

the music of the celestial spheres,

relative to the horizon

of her thigh, where

she leverages the citrus,

whose sweetness seeps onto

her snow-pants

in a few small beads that slide off

and fall into the snow,

leaving behind a few tiny craters

in the shadow of her leg,

a moon-colored blue like the light

from a TV screen left on a station

in the interstitial standby of programming

in the belly of the night—that light—

walking home

from a bar at close, midweek,

en route to an early flight,

the streets as empty as on Christmas Day—

assures: you are not alone

in your inability

to sleep in complete darkness.

We don't speak.

The drone of cars and trucks

traveling on a distant highway

past the tree line hangs hushfully

in the air, infused with citrus. Citrus—

this is the scent of winter,

the scent of the remote

awareness of motion,

of consciousness. I keep track

of time by counting the occasional

crow. Peripherally, I know

she eats the orange one segment at a time,

devotionally, as to make no noise.

Five crows. Six.

Her voice emerges as though

with the seventh, as though the seventh,

over the roofs of the cars and trucks, grazing

the tree line, and through the quivering

sketches of branches drawn over

the erasures of previous attempts:

"The navel of the orange

is a conjoined and underdeveloped twin

from a single mutation of a single tree

at a monastery in Brazil almost two centuries ago."

She tosses the rind,

a continuous coil, a still frame

of a corkscrewing bottle rocket

just before it hits the ground.

It begins to rain.

The rain, too, leaves behind tiny craters

in the snow, as if snowing in reverse.

Not knowing how else to say it:

"How improbable is the color orange."

The words linger in the wake of the flight

of a crow—blue standby—echoes of the spheres—

and then I understand

that I have lost count.

John K., the first few weeks of January 2010