T.R. Hummer
Blood Oranges
They are eating blood oranges
on the broken fire escape.
Blood oranges — what makes us want
to say that? A boy and his mother,
Quietly eating blood oranges.
Behind them, in the apartment,
Another china plate smacks against the wall.
The last plate, the mother knows.
She’s been counting. Next will come
the soup tureen, gravy boat,
Heavy serving dishes. The boy drops
bits of peel into the alley underneath them.
Two stories down, they detonate in afternoon light
while ice on the pitted iron grid
Of the platform implodes inversely.
At least she has saved the one bowl,
This one, where blood orange segments lie.
Who knew her grandmother would leave
Her this? Who knew how the war would end?
Inside, the husband comes to salt
And pepper shakers, not so easily broken.
He throws them again and again.
Bone china. Blood oranges. In this moment
the names are sacramental,
A domestic transubstantiation. The boy
looks out into the contusion
Of the gathering sunset and kicks
the ladder of the fire escape,
Years since rusted through.
He learned this from his father,
As he learned in school Of all the beautiful
cities on earth, the most beautiful is ours —
As he learned from God the blood
of the orange is the blood of God,
The ice of the fire escape is the ice
of God, the growing darkness
In the alley is the darkness of God, growing.
It is winter and God is cold.
From the northernmost province of Paradise,
he can hear the apartment wall
Shattering saucers and cups. He almost
remembers that anger, or something
Exactly like it. The innocents. A bowl
of blood. The jawbone of an ass.
from Useless Virtues, LSU Press, 2001.