Bearing Fruit

Peaches on a White Tablecloth

Color has touched this fruit only in certain places, but with the greatest care.

The shadows of the muslin are of a cool blue, like that of crockery in a humble cottage just outside of Paris. Its white has yielded to the failing light.

They are nestled in gravity’s palm, as if just supporting them were a labor of love.

If color alone could sustain us, these peaches would be good enough to eat.

They are only orange by convergence of allied tints, such as the red of apples, or the yellow of lemons. But to combine these, without the proper restraint, could ruin everything.

Roundness, globular, is light folded into itself to make a translucence.

The half-life of any growth is a logarithm of its decay, turning sweetness into sour, green into yellow, and red, and finally brown.

The sugars sing their special white purity along the palette of the scraping knife.

Oxygen eats the space around them, as if hungry.

The peaches are actually blue.

After Cézanne