Winter Oranges
When my darling twin, Dorothy and I went to the Community College after High School, we would spend hours and hours in the library in the A&S Building researching papers for our darling Tobin, as well as Teresa and then some other chica who I cannot remember her name. We would become engrossed in the microfiche and would read entire “The New Yorker” magazines while doing research on “The Working Poor”, “Cryogenics”, or “Etienne Baillu”, the Frenchman who created the abortion pill, RU-486.
Once, I happened across this poem in the January 19, 1987 edition of The New Yorker magazine and showed it to my dear, darling sis. We loved it and then lost track of it for years-n-years… until her boyfriend, “Man-With-A-Plan“, actually wrote the author and asked for a copy, please. At the time, that made me a little cranky, because I wanted to do something so awesome for my sister, but in the end, I am so happy that Man-With-A-Plan was able to be more, uh, mandarinly polite than me… not really that, but more delightfully ingenious than me. So here it is, the poem after which this entry is named:
We sit, strangers, at the familiar table
Set with winter oranges, your mother’s moon-shaped cup.
Picture of three sisters embracing between wars,
And the plate with flamboyants flowering over Mediterranean
blue,Now the mandarin politeness,
Pouring of coffee, breaking of Lindt,
Icy tick of a dead man’s clock echoing the solitude
We share and, overlying it all,
That perturbed, pearl-in-the-oyster quality about you
As, phrase by phrase, I recite
The never-ending sentence from which we erase ourselves.
How difficult, my love, to separate
The silence of what need not be said from the silence
Of what cannot.
~ L.S. Asekoff
The New Yorker
Jan. 19, 1987 (pg 34)
