An Orange in Mérida

The orange-peelers of Mérida, in the wrought- iron midday, come with mechanical skewers and live oranges, to straddle the paths on caissons of bicycle wheels and work in the dark of the plaza, like jewelers’ cloths. The orange is ceremonious. Its sleep is Egyptian. Its golden umbilicus waits in pyramidal light, swath over swath, outwitting the Caesars. It cannot be ravaged by knives, but clasps its mortality in, like the skein of an asp. The bandstand glitters like bone, in laurel and spittle. Behind their triangular catafalques, the orange-peelers move through the thirst of the world with Rameses’ bounty caulked into the hive of the peel while ratchets and wheels spin a blazing cosmology on their little machines. Under skewers and handles, the orange’s skin is pierced, the orange, in chain-mail and papyrus, unwinds the graveclothes of Pharaoh in a helix of ribbon, unflawed, from the navel’s knot to the rind and the pulp underneath, like a butterfly’s chrysalis. And sleeper by sleeper, the living turn with their thirst to each other, the orange’s pith is broken in a blind effervescence that perfumes the palate and burns to the tooth’s bite. And the dead reawaken.