Research

Once upon a time
I stole a tooth
from the skull of a virgin saint.
When planted, the tooth
bloomed a library.
I read deeply for months.

The virgin’s story,
captured on parchment,
reeked of flowers and sand.
A soldier met her, thought to take her,
then thought again; those words
were scented with iron and spikenard.

When I put down those books
I understood the nature of restraint,
but the distance between understanding
and practicing is wide.  So I returned to the relics,
stole another tooth, and swallowed it.

No secret worth keeping exists 
without a little pain.  No knowledge
blooms to being unless fed by blood.
That tooth bit deep.  It filled me 
not only with my own blood —
but I must hold my tongue about what it gave me
as I tasted sand, ground its grit 
between my own once-ignorant teeth.

I sit now in an impotent library.
Every book read, every page turned —
I’m no better a man than I was before the thefts
and the plantings, though at least I know now
how short I’ve fallen. How deeply I am flawed
when I compare myself to that soldier
who turned from the virgin, took nothing from her
though he had the chance,
and lived happily ever after.