The orange tree

Kobus Moolman

It is the end of June, and our orange tree
at the bottom of the garden, in the corner
where the windy-drier stands
with its rusted arms and sagging wire,
is full of fruit; bright, heavy baubles
that drag the lower branches down
almost to the ground.
We pick and pick the Savlon-coloured fruit,
giving it away to all and sundry:
family, friends, colleagues from work B
the woman who helps weekly with the washing
staggers to the taxi stop with bursting packets.
(We stop short of inviting the neighbourhood kids
for fear of setting a precedent.)
But to no avail. It is impossible to keep up
with the flow of fruit from this little tree
with its hard and dark leaves and its rough,
black branches that fork and flicker
amongst the green like a complicated secret,
a charm for warding off everything except
a straightforward representation of itself.
But the deception’s short-lived.
Yesterday morning early I crept in underneath
the drooping branches with our plastic
washing basket to fill with fruit.
A large orange high up that I could only just
reach proved difficult to break free.
I wrenched at it with all my might
and the branch it was hanging from suddenly
came away. Instantly the air was filled
with the sweet fragrance of the tree’s seclusion.
The scent of the sap’s dark secrets
spilled over the brim that the orange tree
framed between a heavy, green reality
and the invisible. And I slipped
into the lost dimension of memory.
I was a child again, in short pants
and a purple plastic helmet on my head;
at the bottom of the long garden of the house
I grew up in: number 82 Greyling Street,
where I learnt to walk and to talk,
where I spent the first twenty-five years of my life.
There were many trees in that garden:
a fir tree (we called it the Christmas tree),
an old hibiscus my brother and I used as the den
in our catching games, a rugged plum tree
that was my pirate ship in raging winds,
and right at the bottom of the long garden,
against the corrugated iron fence at the back,
a secretive orange tree.
Its dark branches hung silently over a domain
I approached with caution.
A great pile of old bricks bred spiders and dread.
There were rusted poles of various sizes
and planks my father had rescued from nowhere,
stored carefully in a small corrugated iron shelter.
In the afternoons I could hear Afrikaans
radio serials from the house on the other side
of the back fence, while large black birds
screamed overhead like lost or lonely orphans,
landing clumsily in the orange tree
or on the scuffed and faded grass beneath.
It was a terrain mysterious and distant,
made even more mysterious to me because
it was my home, it was my own back yard
that I experienced as intimately as our games
of armies and hide-and-seek.
But that was all too many years ago.
This orange tree now insists upon its simplicity,
its straightforward representation of itself,
of rough and black branches, of fruit like bright
and heavy baubles at the bottom of the garden,
in the corner where the windy-drier stands
rusted and sagging.

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