Our experiences and our emotions can seem so complicated and contradictory as to be impossible to express. This is why writers, such as Li-Young Lee, turn to images. In a poem which starts, “No easy thing to bear, the weight of sweetness,” he asks us to

See a peach bend
the branch and strain the stem until
it snaps.
Hold the peach, try the weight, sweetness
in your palm.
And, so, there is the weight of memory:

Windblown, a rain-soaked
bough shakes, showering
the man and the boy.
They shiver in delight,
and the father lifts from his son’s cheek
one green leaf
fallen like a kiss.

Soon enough, father and son are separated. Even as the son is carrying one of the bags home,

… his father moves 
faster and farther ahead, while his own steps 
flag, and his arms grow weak, as he labors 
under the weight of peaches.

It all happens so fast. The peach, itself the symbol of nothing in particular, becomes laden with meaning as Lee surrounds it with feelings of love and loss, relating them to the fruit’s sugar, the weight that makes it fall, the snap and break as gravity has its way. The various emotions in their intensity feel irreconcilable—until we see them embodied in a single luscious, living substance. This is life, we think. To hold it all inside us can be unbearable, but we get to see it before us, and outside us, to hold it like a peach in our palms. This open space of contemplation, which simultaneously separates and connects us with life, is so often what we crave when we turn to art.

And afterwards? We’re ready to once again be immersed. In the very next poem, Lee writes:

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

(“The Weight of Sweetness” and “From Blossoms” can be found in Lee’s collection entitled Rose)