[Julie Steiner]

I dunno.

I wondered if "al romper" ("on breaking") in L3 represented the twisting motion to separate two cut hemispheres, united by the grippy pit of clingstone varieties of peach. That hemisphere scenario would certainly go well with the next quatrain's mention of a breast (although mention of a pair of breasts would have gone even better, and Rueda didn't do that). Since I wasn't sure, I thought "breaching" the skin might leave more possibilities open, such as if someone were biting into an unpeeled peach. But I don't know why anyone would do that and then go to the trouble of peeling the skin (which is edible, but some people don't like having the fuzz in their mouths, and cooking with the skins on turns the skins leathery).

There's no specific (I almost said explicit, heh) mention of cutting in the poem, until a knife is implied in the final tercet of peeling the skin into a spiraling ringlet. (Is Rueda peeling each separated half?) I assume that he's not jumping around in the timeline, and that the sonnet's grand finale really is the final step. (Could the ringlet/curl suggest public hair? If so, why only one?)

Clearly there's a lot of sexual innuendo going on here, but there doesn't seem to be a one-to-one correspondence with the logical progression of a sexual encounter, either. Unless I've been doing it wrong.

(I've also been reconsidering "Do I dare to eat a peach?" in T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and have come to no clear conclusions about that, either. Let the mystery be, I guess.)