Spices were currency once.
Rent paid in peppercorns.

Can my dishes, so curried they amber the plates
with stains after, ensure the guests I serve stay?

No, you feed guests so they may have strength
to continue the journey away.

A good mother feeds a child so she’ll grow 
large, too large for the house and leave.

There’s no returning to the cinnamon- 
toast–scented school mornings.

—♦

In the middle ages, cinnamon masked the smell 
of decaying flesh. Egyptians embalmed with the spice.

What comfort is the form when it does not hold
its habitant? I would say that, 

except I know when we want to care for something,
what’s available may be a body.

I want to make meals for my mother now,
but she feels full always, eats nothing.

We await the results of her tests, 
scans for a mass in the belly.

—♦

Nutmeg is made of the durable seed 
of Myristica fragrans, mace from lacy red 

fibers in the surrounding flesh. 
Mace is worth more. 

Noting the price difference, a Dutch trader, 
who had never seen the plantations 

of his distant colonies, sent orders: 
Cut down all the nutmeg trees, 

to make room for mace. He did not know.
Two spices come from the same tree. 

—♦

Two spices, one tree: an analogy. 
About how the fineness of life 

cannot be uncoupled from its finitude?
A French serf’s life had measured value: 

A pound of pepper
could buy her freedom. It is freedom 

I should think of, not keeping.
Rent paid does not make a place yours 

permanently. Currency has always been
intended to leave the hands in the end.

—♦

As has the force that moves muscles. 
In the beginning, my mother 

held the spoon that fed me.
Later, she let go.

She’d taught me to ladle myself full of food.
She was behaving as she was supposed to.

But they are the hands that seasoned
the first of every of my tastes.

How can a child manage what, sooner or later
(please be late), I must do? 

---

[from NER 40.1] Subscribe to Read More