Orange

The orange shown through slow revolutions,

Near perfect hint that the world is round.

Glow in their constellations of trees

Where orchards root out an existence.

The child who tore skin to reach the segments

Learnt with knife to peel one long curl.

Segments scrumptious they gorged at once (twice)

Who later set out boat lines at leisure.

It’s impossible to think of other worlds

Where this is so or where blossom bursts

In early spring before bird-nets appear.

Where raincloud insists and persists and desists

Enough for sunlight, that hints and bursts

And afterwards curls in air so many colours.

 

Orange (August)

He exists behind glass. He’s two-dimensional. Every day from August until November I’ll have to put up with him. He’s orange. It’s supposed to be blond but his hair’s orange. Stripes on flags behind him look orange. We’ll have to put up with him. Orange builds walls. Every day he insults someone, like a Bugs Bunny character. Orange is a candidate. Orange gets a kick from cheating people. He won’t be able to do the job, he’s incompetent. Like the joke that makes the plotline in a Bugs Bunny story: Orange applies for a job for which he’s utterly unsuited.

Orange (January)

That familiar bathroom morning window. It’s already more than warmish. January means being on the cool side of windows. The train window, where terracotta roofs take the heat while we read behind the news. It’s comfortable at the office, sight of trees outside a reassuring glimpse of colour, a cool we would believe in. Computer with its clique of clicks, windows of windows alert to evidence, hot, cold. The car lift home, watching pedestrians walking against the sun’s pressure, footpath wall’s extreme. Home is TV, interminable window with its rectangle of orange, bushfire somewhere. Someone’s having to deal with that!

Orange (October)

Christina Rossetti opens with “What is pink? A rose is pink / By the fountain’s brink” then answers for other colours, before her punchline, “What is orange? Why, an orange / Just an orange!” It’s a favourite recital in primary schools, come October. How does the emphasis fall? Simply by her naming it we see the fruit, but since when was it just an orange, this marvel of segmented mouthfuls and sun-brightened rind, this ball of goodness? Victorian science reduced everything to types, its Gradgrind demand for facts turning everything into just oranges. Rossetti rebels, she questions, she mocks Rousseau.