Have you ever wanted to write about your own life, but don’t know where to begin? Focus in on tiny, specific memories, and that’s all you need. There’s plenty of room in our Memoir in Moments online workshop this coming Tuesday, August 18. Click here for the details – I’d love to see you in the room. 

My craving for grapefruit was uncontrollable when I was pregnant, to the extent I would buy ten-pound mesh bags of it and hide three or four in various rooms and drawers, just in case someone came over and tried to take my grapefruit. This is not rational, but neither are many things.

This poem stunned me because it describes exactly the way I eat grapefruit. That cloud of oil, the pearly cells, the pooling juice.

Meditation on a Grapefruit, by Craig Arnold

To wake when all is possible
before the agitations of the day
have gripped you
                To come to the kitchen
and peel a little basketball
for breakfast
              To tear the husk
like cotton padding        a cloud of oil
misting out of its pinprick pores
clean and sharp as pepper
                             To ease
each pale pink section out of its case
so carefully       without breaking
a single pearly cell
                    To slide each piece
into a cold blue china bowl
the juice pooling       until the whole
fruit is divided from its skin
and only then to eat
                  so sweet
                            a discipline
precisely pointless       a devout
involvement of the hands and senses
a pause     a little emptiness

each year harder to live within
each year harder to live without

Click here for more information about poet Craig Arnold. Today’s poem first appeared in Poetry in October 2009. 

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