From Blossoms

Structured around its repetition of the preposition “from” in the first two stanzas and “to” in the latter two stanzas, “From Blossoms” is a poem that asks where our joys originate. The peaches’ backstory, in their passage from orchard and boughs, to bins, to vendor, and finally to the speaker, provides an example of the ways that the simplest pleasures contain much more complex histories. The third stanza extends this principle beyond the case of the peaches in its opening lines, “to take what we love inside, / to carry an orchard within us,” (Lines 11-12), transforming the experience of consuming the peaches into a metaphor for the ways histories are both transformed and preserved by becoming memories. These memories help define the individuals who sustain and carry them into the future.

The poem’s allusion to the book of Genesis through the images of dust and fruit attaches its concern with personal and collective histories to existential and even theological questions about what it means to be human. Beyond indicating merely their roadside environs’ lack of cleanliness, the dust that powders the peaches’ skin suggests death’s inevitability. The theological dimension that the biblical allusion adds to this image of mortality relates this general human condition to a myth of our divine origins in God’s creative act.