The Crypt/the Mango
The Mango
by Mary Oliver
One evening I met the mango. At first there were four or five of them in a bowl. They looked like stones you find in the rivers of Pennsylvania when the waters are low.
- - That size, and almost round.
Mossy green. But this was a rich house, and clever too. After salmon and salads, mangoes for everyone appeared on blue plates, each one cut in half and scored and shoved forward from its rind, like an orange
- - flower,
cubist and juicy. When I began to eat things happened. All through the sweetness I heard voices, men and women talking about something— another country, and trouble. It wasn’t my language, but I understood enough.
- - Jungles, and death. The ships
leaving the harbors, their holds filled with mangoes. Children, brushing the flies away from their hot faces as they worked in the fields. Men, and guns. The voices all ran together so that I tasted them
- - in the taste of the mango,
a sharp gravel in the flesh. Later, in the kitchen, I saw the stones like torn-out tongues embedded in the honeyed centers. They were talking among themselves— family news, a few lines of a song
