Nutmeg and Mace

Spices were currency once.Rent paid in peppercorns.

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

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

A good mother feeds a child so she’ll growlarge, 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 smellof decaying flesh. Egyptians embalmed with the spice.

What comfort is the form when it does not holdits 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 seedof 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 peppercould buy her freedom. It is freedom

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

permanently. Currency has always beenintended 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 seasonedthe first of every of my tastes.

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