The Pantry

It's cold and tin that put me back there,
chill places where things are stored, a day
in some autumn, a supermarket where
the colors and smells and even feel of the floor
add up to some convergence in the spirit,
and I hear you, blessed uncle, saying it's time
to play the game again, or even alone
in a park somewhere, open to the whim of chance
that is what our minds are, as our minds
are all of what we are, and here you are
again, inside me, telling me it's time to play
the game again, as if I am not over fifty now,
and do not know that I was hardly the speck
of what this arthritis has come to be, how
high this blood of mine with its pressure
so that all the world's relaxation leaves me
still with medicine I swallow and come
back to the cold and tin of the pantry—you
singing your hypnosis song of how I have
to play this game, how it is time again
to take things I do not want, and yet I know
enough to know it is not candy, and that it could
choke me if I say bad things about it, make
the dragon inside it rise on a tail of fire and
then spit at me again, the spit the awful
that makes me feel unclean until I take
the dragon like some Perseus, count its nine
heads, the nine heads someone gave to you,
and cut them, one by one, until they are
roses, blushing pink, tender to the touch,
and I come back to some faith that innocence
has a more sacred seduction that is one heart
giving itself to another heart, confessions
in the way of chanting saints, things too big
for a little boy needing a hand to knock
you down, set a holy fire in the pantry,
burn it, send it the way of the unclean.