Classic Poem

These are the absolute top of the line,
I was telling him, they even surpass
the Jiangsu peach and the McIntosh
for lusciousness and subtlety....(He frowned:
McIntosh. How spelling.) We were eating
our way through another kilogram
of mangosteens, for which we'd both fallen
hard. I'd read that Queen Victoria
(no voluptuary) once offered a reward
for an edible mangosteen: I don't know
how much, or whether it was ever claimed.
(But not enough, I'd guess, and no, I hope.)
Each thick skin yields to a counter-twist,
splits like rotted leather. Inside, snug
as a brain in its cranium, half a dozen
plump white segments, all but dry, part
to the tip of the tongue like lips—they taste
like lips, before they're bitten, a saltiness
washed utterly away; crushed, they release
a flood of unfathomable sweetness,
gone in a trice. He lay
near sleep, sunk back against a slope
of heaped-up bedding, stroked slantwise by fingers
of afternoon sun. McIntosh, he said again,
still chewing. I'd also been reading The Spoils
of Poynton, so slowly the plot seemed to unfold
in real-time. “‘Things’ were of course
the sum of the world,” James tosses out
in that mock-assertive, contradiction-baffling
way he has, quotation marks gripped like a tweezers
lest he soil his hands on things,
as if the only things that mattered
were that homage be paid to English widowhood,
or whether another of his young virgins
would ever marry. (She wouldn't, but she would,
before the novel closed, endure one shattering
embrace, a consummation.) I spent the day
sleepwalking the halls of museums, a vessel
trembling at the lip. Lunch was a packet
of rice cakes and an apple in a garden
famed for its beauty, and deemed beautiful
for what had been taken away. I can still hear it,
still taste it, his quick gasp of astonishment
caught in my own mouth. I can feel that house
going up with a shudder, a clockwise funnel
howling to the heavens, while the things of her world
explode or melt or shrivel to ash
in the ecstatic emptying. The old woman set the fire
herself, she must have, she had to. His letter,
tattooed with postmarks, was waiting for me
back at the ryokan, had overtaken me
at last, half in Chinese, half in hard-won
English, purer than I will ever write—

Please don't give up me in tomorrow

The skin was bitter. It stained the tongue.

I want with you more time