Miss Schreckengost and the Mango

by Brett Rutherford

 Apples and oranges
     easy to draw
     no right-way or wrong
     to color the apples
she tells us

     apples are red, oh, yes,
     but they are yellow, too —
And sometimes green, I offer,
And sometimes green, she nods. 

What else? she asks.
                                  Brown,
someone says darkly. Brown
when they are rotten.

 Miss Schreckengost goes on
with blackboard examples:
The orange is round,
the apple more like
    a little heart,
     its dimpled top
     with the stem still on.

 Dutifully we draw
     one apple,
     one orange,
then, crayons out
we fill the outlines
with suitable colors,
(except for Ritchie,
whose angry scrawl
segments his orange,
slices his apple).

 I trace
    and then erase
a wriggling worm,
the kind that make
apples inedible.

 What does an apple
taste like? Miss Schreckengost
queries us? Sweet, all say.
My hand goes up,
Sour, I say. I like
green apples best.

 What does an orange
taste like? the teacher asks.
Sour! — No, sweet!
the children argue.
Red-headed Garnet
says nothing, for she
has never had an orange.

We finally agree
that something can be
sour and sweet together.

 The lesson done,
Miss Schreckengost tells us
to put away the crayons,
sign each our name
below our drawings
with a Number Two pencil.

 As we do this, she slips
into a reverie and says
There is a fruit
you cannot draw.
It is called a mango.
There is no name
for the shape it has,
no single color
in its mottled skin.
There are no words
that can say what taste
belongs to the mango.

 I was in Mexico,
where I met someone.
His name was Alejandro,
and he played guitar
with his delicate
     long fingers.
He fed me my first
     mango
          with a spoon.
There are just no words.

Her eyes looked off
beyond and above
the coal miners’ children
in the hilltop
     school-house.

 Oh! the Mango!

 (Kingview Elementary School, Scottdale PA)