I. Picked Night

To steal a-way: three oranges for love
he was instructed by cackling voices
over time become vague though sharply plucked
and sealed in wide-mouthed, boyish memory.

So, this picked night, he stalks storybook rows
of stubby trees squatting stacked in a maze
pulled straight by tender hands to hide riddles —
a patchwork of endlessly seamed sameness.

Aided by a sickle moon's pointed glance,
he hasty harvests three waxy-lit fruit;
the feather-leafed branch loosed, snapping skyward
as juicy hope drops neatly in his pouch.

II. Striped dawning

Home on morn's edge, a first love he soon sights
her narrow white face with blush-dabbed features,
the tall swab of swirled scarlet hair atop,
a bobbing tongue that bounces into view.

At striped dawning, he, perhaps too eager,
reaches into his bag with halting hand.
An under-ripe gift he blurts out to her,
offered wholly careless, green-tipped, unpeeled.

She takes it, and rolls it in slender hands
thumbs inspecting it, a bit misshapen,
bumps and crevices around knobby stem...
no fruit for her, nose upturned, she walks on.

III. Mid-day Sun

Days left to his virtuous devices,
he fusses over the next, nails digging,
screw-cut peeling its thick rind, picking off
odd pieces of pith to smooth its surface.

After would-be idol hours spent preening,
second love, an acid yellow figment,
floats down to him from distant high hilltop
her flopped gold curls mopping a wide pink brow.

Fruit in palm extended, he waits his worth
while the orange exposed to mid-day sun
shrivels brown, a collapsed-in pulpy mess
that her passing wave topples uneasy.

IV. Evening dreamed

As jagged-tooth fence-post's shadow lengthens,
a sudden unthinking appetite grows.
He grabs the last orange, gobbling it all
but a lone slick seed that sticks in his cheek.

His magic seeming sadly lost, the kernel
he takes, finger-pushes it in topped soil,
then lays his head next to single-seed bed
and sleeps, drowsed by a soft-chirped serenade.

That night, a tree sprouts of strange banded fruit;
perched among its branches, waking he spies
a fairy's green tossed locks, and dreamy she
with limpid hazel gaze smiles back at him.