How Chef Ido Eats an Orange
by Matthew Yeager
The great Chef Ido begins by coming to rest,
by sitting down on a green park bench, by opening
his white paper sack, by producing an orange.
The roundest, the heaviest, the best he could find
in the exposed layer of a fruit stand’s pyramid,
now he sits, knees splayed, hunched,
preparing to eat it, preparing as if preparation
even for something so simple, is everything.
In a din of his own mental noise like instruments
tuning, he turns the fruit around and around
in his hands, massaging it like a pitcher.
He holds it aloft. He tosses it up.
Catches it with a smack. He looks
not around it, into the activity of the park
this midsummer dusk, but at an orangeness
which Plato tells him must have form, and does,
at this orange which, by dint of a dollar bill,
is that most temporary of things: his. He blinks now,
blinks, and by blinking blinks his mind
into something like a stack of Polaroids
of just this one orange. He presses it now
to his chin, feels its give; he rolls his cheek
against its waxen continuous cheek. Facts of the fruit,
citrus, reddish-yellow rind, native to Asia,
stream through his mind: names of this thing
in the languages he talks: orange, ora’nge, naranja,
and in the language he thinks: ולנסיה תפוז, words
which the wordlessness of the orange
seems not so much to contradict,
but to bob in like an unimpeachable ball.
Chef Ido has begun with an idea, an idea
that an orange is like all things,
and like all things, therefore, is unknowable.
Now, because he is the great Chef Ido,
he must prove it as one proves a mountain
unclimbable by sliding down its side.
“What are you, or-AHNGE?” he murmurs.
“Or are you OR-inge? Do we know?
How about where are you? Do we even know that?”
He closes one eye, then the other,
alternates rapidly, and the solid sphere jitters
side to side, like hips, because the orange
is in Ido’s mind, no? And Ido’s hand
is in Ido’s mind, no? And Washington Square
is in Ido’s mind. And the day he’s in, June, 2006.
And a day a bomb went off in Syria 1982.
That is in Ido’s mind. And Ido?
Where is Ido? Ido is in New York, now rotating
an orange around on his fingertips, marveling
at its seamlessness, on a planet called earth,
which lives in his mind as a spinning green ball
he’ll never see with his own two eyes….
To eat this orange, Ido must force his way in.
That’s what the great chef sees. Oh this fruit,
it did not ask for Chef Ido! It was not made
as a Coke can is (with a pull tab) or as or a car is
(with doors that swing). Having no ears,
there is no right word that can enter an orange,
causing it to drop, at once, its protective exterior.
A minor violence will be required.
What are Ido’s options? Teeth? Nails? Knife?
Having bitten nails, a knife in a roll at the bottom
of a bag a bit too large for public use,
having less regard for germs than one might expect
from a Michelin starred chef, he now sinks
his top row of teeth through the orange’s skin
like spades boot-heels have pushed straight down.
(The rind is thick, aromatic, with faintest taste.)
He studies the dark marks he’s made.
His brow deepens, quizzical. Skin broken, cut,
he inserts fingers, wiggles nails, claws
the fresh crack wide. He tries to find
with fingertips that line between pulp and skin
were his fingers tipped with eyes. He does.
His fingers move, peeling, and his feelings
move according to the pleasure principle
of peeling: the fewer pieces a surface
makes when torn away, the more pleasure
lies therein. Chef Ido feels this feeling;
The skin comes off easily as a robe.
Bare fruit, but for a patch of skin on its top,
he sees freshly that the orange is a thing
that is oriented. It has a top; thus, a bottom.
The top is the stem, or where the stem was,
a depression, a green belly button, a memory
of how the orange once dangled like a fat
ornament, a white blossom’s big blown bubble,
one of hundreds of an orange tree’s reddish-yellow…
Wombs? Testicles? Little witnesses to a tree’s
virility? No. The orange is not human.
Now he gets underneath the stem, two fingers
forked like the backside of a hammer, and pulls
what now he names the orange’s spinal column
out like a nail. Out this flexible pillar comes.
It’s like a golf tee, like the root of a weed,
and it remains attached to the inside of the peel,
which Chef Ido also sets aside. For his reasons,
Chef Ido now stuffs the length of his index finger
inside the vacated shaft that runs
through the orange’s center, points his finger up,
and holds the pulpy globe aloft. Side to side
like a peony stalk, he let his finger sway;
the fruit takes it, pulls it; he feels
the fruit’s weight, which is water, which is sweet
stinging juice. Back and forth in a rhythm
like a rhythm that ends in hypnosis,
he wags his weighted finger, and supposes:
“Suppose my finger is not just another
part of me, but is Ido, Ido in Ido’s entirety.
And if I am my finger,
held up as one, like the number I am,
tall bony Ido, with a bend in the middle,
then what is this orange? What is it?”
All he is within? All he’s been pressed into?
All that surrounds? All that might sway?
An army, a city, a gene pool, the air, a country
that is not his country, the larger Law?
If Ido is his finger, the orange is large.
If Ido is his finger, the orange is free.
But no thing of this world is free.
His action throws a shadow on the ground,
the shadow of an orange on a finger,
and it is the 21st century, and he is in New York,
He is in a park called Washington Square.
He is fruit, disconnected from a tree.
Israel and Ido. Ido and his country.
No, an orange is a fruit. It is a fruit
that has been given this name “orange.”
It is the kind of fruit that grows in America
in green groves in a state called Florida.
It is the kind of fruit that grows from the tree
in a woman’s yard in Florida, a waitress he knew, briefly,
the only person he’s ever known from Florida,
and she returned to Florida, and he thinks of her
always when he hears the word Florida,
or scrapes that word on a sticker off an orange
because that is the way the mind works.
And on his finger there is a piece of
Florida and in this piece of this place Florida
there is some sandy soil and some rain
that fell onto Florida, and seeped into Florida,
which an orange tree piped up from roots
into this very fruit, filling it like an orange
balloon on a faucet. All for a purpose
that will remain unknowable. His heart beats
hard, fast. His thoughts run off
like a beach. “The purpose of the fruit
is to disconnect from the tree.
If you take the orange out of Florida,
it is Florida. It becomes Florida.”
And if you take the Ido out of Israel,
because a father has exploded in Syria,
and if that Ido runs away to Paris
looking for Ido, and if that Ido runs
from Paris to New York, still looking?
The purpose of Ido is to go off and be Israel.
The purpose of Ido is to return to Israel
and be a chef named Ido. The purpose
of Ido is to remain unknowable, unknowable….
Matthew Yeager’s poems have appeared in Sixthfinch, Gulf Coast, NY Quarterly, Minnesota Review, and elsewhere, as well as Best American Poetry 2005 and Best American Poetry 2010. His short film “A Big Ball of Foil in a Small NY Apartment” was an official selection at thirteen film festivals in 2009-2010, picking up three awards. Other distinctions include the Barthelme Prize in Short Prose and two MacDowell fellowships. He is the co-curator of the long running KGB Monday Night Poetry Series, and lives in Ridgewood, Queens, NY.
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