The Sonnets to Orpheus: First Series

15

Wait...that tastes good...it's already bolting.
...Just a little music, a tapping, a hum--
Girls, you girls who are silent and warm,
dance the taste of the fruit you've been tasting.

Dance the orange. Who can forget it,
how, drowning in itself, it refuses
its own sweetness. You've possessed it.
Exquisite, it's been transmuted into you.

Dance the orange. Discharge the warmer
landscape out of you so the ripe will glisten
in their native breezes! Glowing, strip

perfume from perfume. Become sisters
with the pure, resistant rind,
the juice that fills the happy fruit!

~Rainer Maria Rilke