Peel

I read that in this famous person’s poems “she searches

for signs of what lies beneath and beyond the self.”

Which seemed to me pointless, as if you wouldn’t know

whether to paint with egg tempera or eat it. At eighteen,

I came across Tolstoy’s “What is Art?” where he said

an artist is different from other people because instead

of eating an apple he paints it. Even then I thought why

can’t he paint it and then eat it, the way at eight, the war

just over, I stood shoeless in line in the snowy playground

where one of the kids was handing out something that turned out

to be small pieces of orange peel, something exotic we’d never

seen before which I smelled, nibbled, and finally ate for this poem.