Poem: Fruit

Tasting the fruit is like tasting the place
the faraway rustic region that made it real -
hints of its wind, scent of the earth,
sweet juice of the rain that nurtured it.
I wonder the tree that brought it forth
or the name of the land that fed that tree.
I wonder the landscape, the arboreal clumps,
the dust of the road that wraps it in summer.
A way I can learn is how my tongue
reads the taste of its watery flesh.
Bits of itself might tell me its world
different than the giant trees of stone
and glass of my world, where fruits grow
inside, have opposable thumbs, learn
to walk upright, dream of other places
and write, and taste each other's fruits.
The world of the fruit I have in my hand
must have a fog that crawled from the mountains,
a fog that was once the fruit of the sky
called cloud, plucked by the wind, and silently
made its way to the orchard, dispersing
as it passes those tiny fruits of water
called dew, each having a memory
of the sumptuous troposphere where they came.
Tasting the fruit is like tasting the peel
of atmosphere that surrounds the earth
which is like the fruit of a tree called Sun,
gravity rooted in the wide universe.