Craig Arnold

Craig Arnold earned his BA in English from Yale University and his PhD in creative writing from the University of Utah. The raw, emotional intensity of his second collection, Made Flesh stands in stark reply to the classical, formal mastery displayed in Arnold’s first collection, Shells (1999), which won the 1998 Yale Younger Poets Award. His honors included the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholarship, the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the US-Japan Creative Artists Exchange Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. A Fulbright Scholar at Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, Colombia, Arnold was also an avid musician and performed as a member of the band Iris. In 2009, Arnold traveled to Japan to research volcanoes for a planned book of poetry. In April of that year, he disappeared while hiking on the island of Kuchinoerabujima. Source

Meditation on a Grapefruit

To wake when all is possible

before the agitations of the day

have gripped you

To come to the kitchen

and peel a little basketball

for breakfast

To tear the husk

like cotton padding a cloud of oil

misting out of its pinprick pores

clean and sharp as pepper

To ease

each pale pink section out of its case

so carefully without breaking

a single pearly cell

To slide each piece

into a cold blue china bowl

the juice pooling until the whole

fruit is divided from its skin

and only then to eat

so sweet

a discipline

precisely pointless a devout

involvement of the hands and senses

a pause a little emptiness

each year harder to live within

each year harder to live without

Published:

2009

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2022

Themes:

Food

Joy & Praise

Poems of the Everyday