To Savor

To savor

—If there are lemons, we make lemonade;
among us all we understand each other.
So says papa lemon in a patriarched voice:
among yellowish acids...
let us savor.
The oranges with their pithy hides
are round and golden ladies,
sighs of sugar held in an embrace,
nothing more, nothing less: little footlights.
Adolescents with faces of nothing:
they file down their figures, the limes do.
They paint with watercolors
the household of green sentinels.
The mandarin girls
are the tenderest of all,
daughters in segments with fine pulp
who break the drowsiness with no handle to turn.
The pesky kumquat cousins
are austere and foul-mouthed,
they want to be listened to
in the art of accepting themselves as sourish ones.

The exotic bergamots
are the traveling relatives,
their presence is rare and remote,
they vanish like showbiz divas.
And the grumpy grapefruit
says what's already said — that one is the grandfather.
Bitter and deep, with a stern-skinned rind,
the one who tells the stories that endure.