“Meditation on a Grapefruit” Craig Arnold

Where else but in poetry can a grapefruit hold court, however briefly, over your attention.? In Christian Wiman’s He Held Radical Light, the author brings the point home well enough thanks to a poem by the late Craig Arnold. The poem raises a grapefruit—yes, a grapefruit—to art form.

Reading the neat little details in this poem should inspire you to raise your own humble wonder (be it citrus or any other object, man- or God-made) to a higher understanding. All you need do is spend some time with it. Look at it more closely. Listen a spell. And see this as being very much like that.

Yeah. That’s it. Simple.

If you hadn’t heard of Arnold before, it’s because he has but two works of poetry to his credit. His book Shells was selected winner of the 1998 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition by some poet or other named. W.S. Merwin. And Wiman thinks Arnold’s sophomore effort, Made Flesh, published a whopping 10 years later.

Let’s join him for a breakfast of literal and figurative delight, shall we?

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