Out of lemon flowers
loosed on the moonlight,
love’s lashed and insatiable essences,
sodden with fragrance,
the lemon tree’s yellow emerges,
the lemons move down
from the tree’s planetarium
…
We open the halves of a miracle,
and a clotting of acids brims into the starry divisions
creation’s original juices, irreducible, changeless, alive,
so the freshness lives on in a lemon,
in the sweet-smelling house of the rind,
the proportions, arcane and acerb.
Cutting the lemon the knife leaves a little cathedral:
alcoves unguessed by the eye that open acidulous glass to the light;
topazes riding the droplets, altars, aromatic facades.
So, while the hand holds the cut of the lemon, half a world on a trencher,
the gold of the universe wells to your touch:
a cup yellow with miracles,
a breast and a nipple perfuming the earth;
a flashing made fruitage, the diminutive fire of a planet.