A Kernel of Wheat

Self-Portrait as a Royal Dansk Cookie Tin

None of them said that oak roots would pierce me,
my aluminum skin. Clay, like most things,
is black in the dark, but I have heard underground
through my timpani lid it’s red up there.

A boy released me high and far from the future
and I landed here, this back half-acre
beside a creek that points like a little finger
from the river’s blue arm. Cahaba. Once

I was just metal tin, a sweet drum, stacked 
with sugared shortbread cookies, my skin
adorned in pictures of the same, but perfect. 
Now, I am one more part of this place, less 

a feature than a room for a boy’s, a man’s, 
idea of home. Remember your roots, they say, 
but I want nothing more than to forget them 
– who hurt me, made me wake for the pain. 

I have become more than I should be. I feel 
my insides breathe, contained as I am and low 
as the mole, my friend, who gnaws away at my edges. 
Soon, though, he will come for me, the one 

who buried my body. It’s all in the letter. 
Daddy-and-them gone, a pale, budding family 
lives now on the other half of the yard’s 
meadow-grass. I hear, feel, the footfalls 

of the new father stalking from the concrete stoop 
to the burn pile and back like an ant seeking 
pheromone, or the moon looping on its salt cord. 
You didn’t think I knew about that, did you?

The oak sends information into me and my 
companions in the dark, the beetles that shuttle the stars’
light below, and the moles who know only 
by feeling. Worms that love nothing but earth
 
but dream of being rivers. I know that once 
over the stolon-gravel road a house burned. 
The trees burnished to metal in the bucking roar
and glow, like clouds quickened in eddies of sun. 

The oaks looked on, swaying, nervous, and let us 
know the way it smoldered. Their voices, if you 
can call them voices, are a ringing inside a heavy wind. 
Many nights I have wished they would leave me to this 

baffled waiting. That or account for my insides, 
wet now for all the nights in groundwater 
and mycelium tears. I am four glass beads
with little sails inside them, like eyes, but I have to

imagine their color. Six uniformed men 
on thick paper cards. They pose in a field 
with bright spheres like white mushrooms, or,
again, like the moon. He hid them inside of me, 

with soldiers of stuff like molded clay but harder, 
their feet joined to a platform or stamp. Made in 
China. A dried magnolia flower. And my heart 
is the letter he wrote wrapped in silver foil, 

my dreams those words I’ll never see. I imagine
the day when finally he comes, the boy who wished
into the future, the man who longed into the past,
his mattock piercing through roots and clay with the light, 

and when it strikes my center, I’ll welcome it 
with a ring. I don’t need to see his face. He will 
read me, my illegible heart. Then whose words
will I be? Beside myself, an upturned bell 

in the grass, I wonder if I will be nothing. 
Or will his body become my own. I imagine 
the oaks are right – I will quietly fill with starlight
while the moon grows new with longing.

A Mission

          Chimán District, Panama

Once, my god was awesome, I knew.
I wanted you to feel it too, the word

smoldering in your open body, an ember
from history's wheel where the heart should be.

Now, in our plateau hut of rain, Isla
del Rey in the distance, I can only pantomime,

work the spell, my hands on your shoulder
and crown, a man three times my age.

I mouth words in a language I don’t speak,
a prayer in Spanish I butcher and mix

in my desire to do right with Latin I recall
from movies—that the spirit of Jesus heals you,

takes up residence in your heart. Where I
come from, men speak in the voice of God

amongst family and friends, tongue
the words of our fathers like beads receding

into the weightlessness of memory,
like those illustrations in school. The Planets

or The Family of Man – wriggling up
from the borderless sea to crawl on sand,

to walk and speak and sing. A naked bulb
hangs in the dark, vaporing its praise,

and now I know by your look
that you see me, the drowning boy,

my alien cant like a raft. How else to thank you
but with my eyes. Still, we embrace

by the dripping eves, move with the small
congregation into a new song. He has

ransomed me. Who the son sets free
is free indeed. Our voices fill the room,

and suddenly I see an afternoon back home,
the first neighborhood, my sister and me,

our mother and father. This boy
from a few houses down our street

had offered me a poseable plastic figure,
a doll with a flag for a cape, a character,

I supposed, from a comic book. He looked
at me, said, I gave you something good,

then stared beneath the oak trees receding
down the street, and waited.

A Kernel of Wheat

For two years, my idea of heaven was an Ingle's
grocery store off of US Highway 23, far too large

for any town, but this was part of the draw, the utter
immensity of it, the high ceilings of indoor spaces

that have caught me up into dream since I was a kid,
the banks of fluorescent bulbs receding to infinity

by a trick of the eye and mirrors over the big letters
spelling SNACKS and PRODUCE on opposing walls,

the limits of my personal world of forms.
When I was a child, if we had been good that week,

my mother would reward my sister and me
with a cereal of our choosing from the ironed-out rainbow

of the breakfast aisle, some so high on tippy toes I
couldn't touch them. Later, my greatest love

was a refrigerator pregnant with malted hops, my last dollar,
quarters, and more than I could drink, more than anyone

could tell me not to, enough to douse the inner child,
drown the voice of my loving mother, merciful father,

the pastor with his attempts at pseudo-diagnosis
Sunday mornings. He started it all, my grandfather,

so let me blame him. When I am alone, though,
what can I blame but the well of words I cannot help

but draw from now. I miss them really. Still, I feel
like a jackass, the one they say conveyed a god, high 

on a pass of arid rock. Dust and pebbles unsettle
my weathered cloven hooves. I slip and careen 

through a sheerness of air until arriving, finally, at earth,
not soft. The pilgrims who used to whip me go on,

simply themselves, bundles shouldered along the difficult
blindingly radiant way, as they were born to do.