Linda Dove


What I Learned This Week About Desire  


Saffron found its way north before oranges,
before the color orange was a word: 

English had only yellow-red, after the stigma
of the crocus. Then Seville oranges 

were sunk in salt water all the way to Dundee,
mixed with sugar, boiled translucent 

into marmalade, spooned on tongues
that were inventing the color, the word 

with no rhyme. This week I learned
that desire floats like a life raft, an orange 

bubble on the surface of an hour, bittersweet
reminder that the world can suddenly 

flare into an S.O.S. or a spark or the heat
of spice in a finger cut. It isn’t trying 

to save me—it wants to peel me back
until I can see through myself, 

back to when I swore never again and
said I’m so much happier without. 

But the truth is we travel, the word naranga
becomes arancia becomes orange. 

Look at what we’ve misnamed—the red fox,
the robin’s red breast, red-heads—as if 

the colors of fire are interchangeable,
as if we forget that each burn is its own.

 


Nazar for a World on Fire           
(amulet against that which is broken) 


In the pine trees, there is a bug that turns the wood blue,
the color of thunderstorms gathering in the grain
without real water. Needles parch and rust. 

Here is a word like dapple, like roan. Here are
the hides of horses moving together, landscape and cloud. 

In the mountains, there is a wind that carries fire over thresholds.
It embers the trees and the deer and the eyes of rabbits,
which fall and refall. Rocks blacken and spall.

Here is the sound of wild cherries dropping like dark rain. Here are
bees that risk everything to suck sweets where I walk. 

In the rain forest, there is a fire that furnaces the world,
its heat licking the life from bayou and fjord, reef and steppe,
without stopping. The green done.

Here is a rhyme, too easy, too easy, which chimes its way
back to my grandfather’s orchard. Here is the apple. The seeds. 


 
Linda Dove

Linda Dove holds a Ph.D. in Renaissance literature and teaches college writing in southern California. Her award-winning poetry books include In Defense of Objects (2009), O Dear Deer, (2011), This Too (2017), and Fearn (2019). Poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America, Best of the Net, and Best Microfiction. She serves as faculty editor of MORIA, the national literary magazine of Woodbury University.

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