the evening party

Under a blanket of snow, citrus, petals, and Rilke are mandatory presences.

Wait ..., that tastes good ...It's already in flight
... Just a little music, a stamping, a humming - :
Girls, you warm, you silent girls,
Dance the taste of the fruit experienced!

Dance the Orange. Who can forget it,
how, drowning in itself, it resists
its being-sweet. You have possessed it.
It has been deliciously converted to you.

Dance the Orange. The warmer landscape,
fling it out of you, that the ripe one be radiant
in homeland breezes! Aglow, peel away

perfume on perfume! Create the relation
with the pure, reluctant rind,
with the juice that fills the happy fruit!

Flowers, kin in the end to those arranging hands,
(girls' hands of then and now),
you that lay on the garden table often from edge
to edge, drooping and gently hurt,

awaiting the water that once more was to recover you
from death already begun -, and now
lifted again between the streaming poles
of feeling fingers that are able to do

even more good than you guessed, light ones,
when you came to yourselves in the pitcher,
slowly cooling and giving warmness of girls,

like confessions, from you, like dreary wearying sins,
committed by your being plucked, relating you
again to those who are your allies in blooming.

(Polaroids by me, portraits by David Hamilton)