By Karen An-hwei Lee
1.
For the last orange tree, a masquerade of a dozen myths —
On the corner of Iglesia Oasis de Gloria, out of a coastal mesa where the freeway ends at a beach city, in a soft albedo of hidden southern California suns, the tiniest of those suns, the unskinned pulp before we said tangelo or clementine or even oroblanco for grapefruit, hybrid of a sweet orange and a pomelo — the low movement of light in the morning — a waking dream of invisible oranges razed long ago on a boulevard of ginger-washed light. Please do not say orchard yet.
In northeast Santa Ana by a stucco-and-terra-cotta museum with a giant agave, in a fenced lot of zoysia lawn grazing fire-ladders by abandoned fruit-picker poles, orange trees flourish rough as centuries-old olives on the margins of a graveyard, as southern cypress. A voluble garden of paradise speaks the language of oranges: Peligro. No entre. Danger. Do not enter. Angelenos with flashing swords — no traffic lights. Globes of low-hanging fruit ripen — acres of citrus gold. Flowering swords. Espadas con flores.
If a June marine layer hasn’t rolled onto the mesa, in the far distance by a furniture store of broken-down, build-your-own furniture serving ollalaberry torte and Swedish meatballs in a penthouse bistro vaster than the post office down the street — a solo orange tree. I speak in tongues of warrior hummingbirds.
2.
One name has the word “coast” in it, and the other “island.”
One is primarily indoor.
Who are we?
3.
Santa Ana winds originate in the high desert, miles inland.
In late August and September, the Santa Ana winds blow for days without apparent reason, temperatures rising into the nineties. Santanas recur in January when pear blossoms open at the police substation — whispering aroma in the young ears of gardenias, shy calyxes of tea roses and fuchsia bougainvillea, the paper eucalyptus brushed with flame.
4.
So, what happened to the orange groves?
“Sold for real estate development.”
“Urbanization.”
“Oranges moved to the Inland Empire.”
“Oranges moved to the San Joaquin Valley.”
“They built condominiums out of them.”
“They built the airport.”
“They designed Irvine.”
“Multimillion dollar homes.”
“Fashion Island and South Coast.”
5.
Surfers on bicycles, with fishing poles, whistling, yodeling, hang gliding, shouting whars your dog.
6.
Shore erosion from Seal Beach to San Juan Capistrano, where the swallows no longer return.
Using cirrus for chalk, God draws a faraway edge — blurs with the skyline over sea where houses of bankruptcy and mansions of multifarious repute or none at all slide down the beach bluffs. Huntington Beach. Laguna Niguel. Balboa. Corona del Mar. Dana Point. San Clemente. The ocean tosses to the west as you drive north on the Pacific Coast Highway towards Santa Monica, salt of broken surfboards, sea of missing chassis, of tangled rattan and flaming jacaranda and fig groves, hyacinth of weather, not traffic, pacific yet subliminally restless, of cullet — glass garbage — worn smooth to turquoise sea glass, of hurricane lamps and shipwrecks, of megachapels broadcasting live sermons — come as you are — in the welcome transparent vernacular of the New Living Translation, of a thousand spun-silver cocoons in a raven wilderness of lilies not spinning their own splendor, a silk-blue yonder inhabited by the luxury yachts of heirs to razors, fashion, tires, asbestos, textile, steel music, pickles, women’s cosmetics, vaporous leisure on the rocks, the vanity of lacquer, and opulence of botulinum toxin A.
7.
Raging seasonal fires.
Years ago, before the economic recession, I saved enough money to buy a harp. Not a gilded orchestral harp with a pillar tall as a halogen floor lamp — a folk-luthier’s hand-carved harp. I called a luthier in Colorado and asked for a quote. The luthier, after realizing where I was, asked how close the fire was. On national news, the brushfire. Eleven miles, I said. Silence. It’s all right, I added. Wind’s southeasterly, so the flames won’t jump the freeway. Are you okay? said the luthier. Yes, I said, touched by his concern. I ordered the harp, and the luthier mailed it to me on a cross-country bus. The harp rode alone in a fleece-lined case, Venus de Milo wheeled on Greyhound seafoam.
Under a waxing moon by railroad tracks.
Across red rocks, the southwest deserts.
Fresno, Bakersfield, the Valley, or Indio.
Inland Empire into the OC.
A parcel service delivered it to my front door.
A miracle, the harp journeyed alone as she rode the bus out of the conflagration’s reach. After days breathing ash out of a firewall sky, molten roof tar and dark creosote — my throat brass as a saxophone, not even a smoky-sweet fireplace or a coal pit at the beach — the raging brushfires vanished when rain fell. No winter rain or flash flooding but enough to quell the firestorm.
8.
Floating desire to see black swans on the lake —
not only coots and lesser egrets and run-of-the-mill mallards and a heron once in a blue moon or flocks of gulls. The lake bottom is poured concrete with aerators and surface fountains of lichen-hued verdigris, the water a cool shade of tourmaline, the passion of warring hummingbirds. Instead of covering townhomes with termite fumigation tents, forcing us to evacuate our Mediterranean herb gardens and Phalaenopsis moth orchids and potted aloe vera, let us invest a percentage of the cash reserves in black swans and a new orange grove
of blood oranges in rows,
the adorable cara cara
of blossom-end navel,
crisp winter satsumas,
thin-skinned valencias,
castellana Spanish naranjos,
gold sunstar and tomangos,
bergamot and mandarin,
honey against bitter,
seed or cultivar.
9.
Sure, I’ll give you directions.
To drive to Los Angeles, take the 55, no, the 5, not the 57, or better yet, use side roads to the 605. If you’re going south to the beach cities, pay the toll and take the 73. Avoid the 405. If you’re going north to South Central or East L.A., take the Santa Monica East or else the 5 all the way to K-town. If you’re going to Cherry Street — now known as L.A. Live — take the 110 first, then the 10 to Pico Boulevard. To drive way out east to Riverside, take the 91.
10.
“I broke my surfboard this morning.”
“My snowboard was stolen out of the carport.”
“The 55 was a parking lot all the way to Anaheim.”
“The 57 was backed up to Fullerton.”
“The 405 did not move.”
“I lost my ignition key on the pier.”
“I lost my wetsuit. It was on the railing.”
“I was in my acting/modeling class.”
“A flock of starving pelicans.”
“A tsunami.”
“A minor earthquake.”
11.
Honestly said, the right-wing politics infuriate left-wingers.
I fold my clothes in sleek origami shapes, place them in a suitcase, and fly away. To cities buried in the cavernous snows of winter — a polar vortex. When I fly back to this incandescence, of marquise diamonds on mirrors and pear-cut sapphires on velvet, the hieratic azure of heaven ascending or descending our cathedral ceilings without a loss of heat radiance while the Holy Spirit shields us from our own follies in a dispensation of grace, flowing with the hopes of migrant laborers who dreamed of lives beyond oranges in this world, of tristeza which a young man told me is sadness — a virus carried by an aphid — blighting the orchards —
I pray with a left wing quietly folded like an ironing board.
I witness the flagrant materialism, the foil of reverse racism, the outright xenophobia, the so-called color blindness which is a guise for preserving status quo inequities, tax shelters constructed to serve those who wrote them into law, of racial profiling on the streets, of class privilege at the international orchid festival, of girls slash-burned by cigarettes and mutilated by razors, of a lone child stolen from her overseas family sweeping the garage with a broom, of turf and skinheads and wash labs, the bones in the arroyos and inland trails, whiteness blind to our women of color —El Salvadoran, Vietnamese, Mexican, Nepali, Colombian — waxing white floors or white skin, who sip Ceylon black tea infused with lavender thinking tea party.
Then I cannot write.
Yet I must. So I fly away.
I unfold the ironing board although I do not iron.
I unfold these lines.
12.
Come to me,
all you who are weary and burdened,
and I will give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you and learn from me,
for I am gentle and humble in heart,
and you will find rest for your souls.
Karen An-hwei Lee is the author of Phyla of Joy (Tupelo Press, 2012), Ardor (Tupelo Press, 2008), and In Medias Res (Sarabande Books, 2004), winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award. Her book of literary criticism, Anglophone Literatures in the Asian Diaspora: Literary Transnationalism and Translingual Migrations (Cambria, 2013), was selected for the Cambria Sinophone World Series. She earned an MFA from Brown University and PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, she lives and teaches in greater Los Angeles, where she is a novice harpist.
