A LEMON
(by Pablo Neruda)
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.
