Zen and the art of peeling an orange
For the first two years of your apprenticeship
you will study and practice eighteen hours a day,
steeping yourself in shade, texture and scent.
Weigh the fruit in your hand. Acknowledge
its excellence, forgive it its blemishes. Meditate
upon its prior manifestations: cockroach, emperor,
grain of sand. Enter its spirit. Pray for its soul.
With your front teeth make an incision either side
of the five-pointed disc where it was torn
from its mother-tree (the opposite end to the navel).
Relish the zest. Insert your thumbnail, trimmed
to a chisel point. Execute a spiral peeling.
At first, your crude mudras will either puncture
a protective membrane, spilling the lifeblood
of its segment of flesh, or will detach
a sliver of peel the size of a small coin, leaving
the rest in place. Most likely, they will do both.
After a further five years of endeavour
you will be able to remove the skin intact
with a single sweep of either thumb, creating
a crude replica of the Bodhnath stupa
at Bhadgaon, festooned in streamers of pith.
Finally, as a Maharapurusa, you will, in the space
of the beat of a humming bird's wing, create
a living orange Buddha, complete with urna,
toenails and genitalia, umbilical cord pulsing.
You will place the sheared globe in your palm.
As you tug on a single strand of pith
the remainder will unravel like an old sweater.
One tap and the segments will topple,
naked as babies, to form the Dharmachakra.
mudras: mystic ritual gestures of the hands of deities.
stupa: Buddhist relic mound.
Maharapurusa: Great Person.
urna: whorl of hair on the brow of the Buddha.
Dharmachakra: The Wheel of the Law.
poetrymagazines' note: This poem subsequently appeared in the author's first full collection Human Geography, published by Driftwood Publications in 2005.
Page(s) 34-35
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