In "From Blossoms" what is Li-young Lee saying about the act of eating peaches

The achingly sensual poem shows such raw physicality as to almost lean-to peach juice and little spots of finely curled, precisely haired skin on the page. Yet it is not the mere nectar and tenderness of peaches that causes such respectful tonality in a mere 22 lines. As important as peach, as much as it rests itself in all its wonderful and impenitent spirit, every peach, everything, is about much else as well.

For Lee, the expedition of a peach and its pleading poetry begins with blossoms. Then boughs, hands, bins, nectar, and the peach’s dusty ski "dust we eat." Dust we "take inside," thus pleasant one with the peach and its dust, developing within us our own "orchard," however momentarily, the wall sorting out inner from outer, subject from object, eater from eaten, the real from the abstract. This is peach-eating as Empathy, as Sacrament.

From the actual reality of blossoms, bags and bins in the start of the poem, Lee changes us to a figurative taking inside of days and shade the round jubilant of peach. For the moment, the ever present shadow of our death as an alternative darting from joy to joy and the now not concrete, but impossible blossom to blossom.

An involved and concentrating human is doing this admiring and rejoicing this jubilant. Someone who has come to peaches with a certain openness and extent of spirit and thoughts, with attention engrossed not only on the thing, the peach before him, but on his inner response, what the peach provokes first in his breathing, his saliva, his loins, and then in his imagination and the language he uses to give that imagination its own bodily constituent of words, within the even more bodily building of a poem.