Song of the Mango

Where men threw metal scraps to knock the mangoes down. They gave one to me, which I took to the small kitchen with a window and countertop of blue tiles. The sun was rising through that window, with my mango ecstatically alone. I had a thin knife, stood there paring and peeling the very smell of a mango, which smelled deeper yellow, golder than it looked inside, smelled like butterfly drought down the neck of a flower. Covered me and took me over—honey-flesh, ambrosia, juice-leather. When I buried my teeth to the hilt in its slippery meat, and the fragrant shine ran down my neck, over my breasts swathed in India linen. When the sun came in just then, the sight of God falling on me, covered where I stood in carnage of nectar, more sexual, more sexless than I could ever be. When I pulled…