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Dana Littlepage Smith

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Avocado Lessons

My mother told me her secret late in life:
only if the seed of avocado is split will they root.
In childhood’s house, they were everywhere —
the alligator pear — her handiwork, her seeds
fat as figs, yet hard — were levered
with three toothpicks over a water jar
until they broke the skin, sent down roots,
or died. Her avocados never fruited
but they loomed in clay pots in the ice room
where I sat on the cold flag floor by myself
long afternoons in their shadows and watched them tower.
We were each alone, my mother, brother and father —
it seems it was such a small thing in us that failed to flower.
Thirty years later and I have learned to bury
the seeds in my compost bin.
There must be — even late in life —
ways to begin again so I drop them
amidst skins of cantaloupe melon and bananas.
Rot heats them through the winter months
where swaddled in the dark, they begin to crack.
I plunge my spade in deep today.
This earth wants lifting. I fork the radish leaf
and tulip head and carrot rind of last May.
And then I find it, rising sweet as a nut,
the hard heart of the seed deep in muck.
Its long night has mulched it. Now I see
nothing is ruined only readied
so unhappiness can end Mother,
as it began, without fanfare.
The fissured seed lifted from its mire
fits perfectly in my hand. I see now the way
to break and send forth a root, if not to fruit
then at least to leaf and lift a green flag of fire.

Page(s) 26

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