I am sorry about the mud-prints
on the floor. I wanted to harvest the last
of the onions.

Whether onions wait for people
or people wait for onions
is a metaphysical problem.

They weren’t ready to be washed
and cut for broth.
I wasn’t ready to leave

so I left

them in their blanket of dirt.
You will find they fill with flavour
in a palmful of days

when rain is sawing the hard-clay ground
and hummingbirds have devoured
your tossed persimmons.

An heirloom, my devotion for
dirt. I am native to the season
of withering. I scatter

seeds over stone, believe
in the sun’s mercy. May bees
colonize your garden,

mumble a spell
of pollen for the onions.
How gentle in the gory face

of the world—you, labouring
to grow an O that makes
you weep into your knife.