All the talk of local artists trying to connect to audiences by livestreaming their freaky performances got me thinking of Mary Ruefle's poem "Kiss of the Sun," which you can find in her Selected Poems, available for purchase at local bookstores.

Ruefle structures the poem around a sentimental cliche common in movies: even though circumstance separates two loved ones, they can somehow be in the same place by looking at the same object. In most cases, it's the moon. In Ruefle's case, it's an orange she tosses up above the teeming crowds at the end of time itself.

A few observations:

• To express our deep concern and interest for others, sometimes we put a hand on a shoulder or physically comfort them in some way. But this form of expression is impossible for the speaker in Ruefle's poem. "Remember," she writes, "on earth / I did not know how to touch it it was all so raw." When I've read this poem in the past, I always read that line as a nice excuse for poets who'd rather write about the world than experience it. During a pandemic, however, when we're all expressing our deep concern for others by staying 6 feet away from them at all times, I can see now that the speaker's distance from earthly things, such as "wheat and evil and insects and love," is really a way to express her great respect for the world.

• The orange in the poem recalls the poem's title, "Kiss of the Sun," an obvious pun on Sunkist oranges. Aside from being kinda funny, the pun draws a parallel between the poem itself and the reader, and the orange in the poem and its recipient. That's an efficient way to have the poem literally embody the idea that humans can bond at great distances through shared art objects, which is the subject of the poem, if you ask me!

• As with the Neruda poem from yesterday, Ruefle balances her sentimentality and grandeur with pedestrian phrases. The best example of this, for me, is when she says she's offering the orange "in case you are thirsty, which / does not at this time seem like such a wild guess."