Still life with fruit

Ode to mid-summer luxuriance

Frida Kahlo, Viva la vida, 1954

“In summer the song / sings itself”—this line from Williams Carlos Williams’ The Botticellian Trees has been in my head for the last several weeks.

I love the look of August.

After weeks of heatwave, skies appear fatigued. The trees, too, seem saturated. August is a faded month, here in the heartland of summer, a month of mystery doors: everyone seems to be retreating—indoors from the heat, away to cottages, off on trips, or else quietly going about their business. We look for ways to cool ourselves: an air-conditioned matinee, a double scoop waffle cone, the chilled wedge of a watermelon.

In Ode to the Watermelon, Pablo Neruda describes the fruit as “a jewel box of water”, “a phlegmatic queen of the fruit stops”, “a warehouse of profundity”, “the green whale of summer”(!) Charles Simic referred to watermelons as “green Buddhas on the fruit stand.” As a teenager I remember finding a copy of In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan and being enamoured by the opening line: “In watermelon sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar.” An arrangement of watermelons, carved up, slashed in half, vibrant and ripe—"Viva la vida” or “Long live life”—are the subject of Frida Kahlo’s last painting, completed a week before her death in 1954.