The Past

You must surrender your teeth to it,
sign your candied eyes away,
deliver yourself in rings and butterflies
like dough to the baker’s oven.

Years of light gone tungsten-silver,
fidelity to a tune no longer heard,
sacks of onions, a toy pony or zebra,
steppingstones inlaid with marbles,
with blue and yellow tiles in the garden
and the garden whispering.

Come back to the earth, little stones!

And they do. It gives them up,
they are released
from a weakening bond poured ages ago
and shaped in plastic forms.

In the kitchen, too, in the shower,
tiles are missing everywhere,
like apples taken by October wind.

Red skin, sweet flesh, the nave of the core
like a chalice, like a hidden cathedral
and its secret parishioners- the pips, the seeds.

Beneath their mahogany armor, o
what mischief the seeds have planned.