"Every day is a god, each day is a god."
~ Annie Dillard
You buy fruit when you can: mangoes, peaches, cherries
for their polislhed crimson globes, pears for their green
dimpled hips. Pilled high in bins at the store, apples look
like they're glowing from within because they've been
coated with carnauba or candelilla wax. An apple a day
keeps the doctor away, your mother would chant, washing
then peeling a Red Delicious apple bought from the post
exchange market where you could get "Stateside" goods.
Expensive, but worth it if it would bring your appetite back,
your health, the health of the one languishing in bed
from long illness. It's as if a god had put a miracle in
the fruit, or a god was in the fruit itself, waiting for
the merest chance to show its benevolence. If a bruise
darkens the cheek of a peach overnight, if the toilet
on your office floor smells like something died in there
or if the mail brings you alarming test results, are these,
then, also some kind of message from the divine?
Every day, you keep some kind of tally: how many cups
of coffee before noon, how much rain came down to flood
the interection, who called and left how many voicemails?
Every evening, you rinse the plates after dinner with a soapy
sponge. You draw the blinds close, heat water for tea.
The car swerving without warning into your lane just
narrowly missed you. You gave a reference for
a former student. All the things you managed to do
and say Yes to before the day, or the god, shut the door.
