Jackfruit

Jackfruit

by Ran Zhao

I didn’t know, even, that the small, breathing

bundles of flesh I found stranded on the seaside

were living animals. They were warty like pickles,

pink of pale quartz, fist-sized organs

in the warming seagrass. Turning them over

and tossing them back into the surf,

how could I know that they felt my hands?

And all along, the sutra I thought was about jackfruit

was really about emptiness.

For ten years, I held it to my chest

without knowing, whispering paramita

and thinking of the hills before the sea,

their heavy prickled boughs, the air like humid honey.

Everything feels heavy with meaning

before it cracks.

Everything means more than I think it means,

even as I fill it with breath.

I collect poems like baskets of gray stones

and heave them up the mountain.

When I die, they’ll tumble from my arms

and crack open, revealing themselves to be geodes.