The Acorn

You could call it a seed,
an acorn, that small place
from which we stretch limbs—

The pizza place is pretty good,
they say, but has my tongue
changed, and how we worshipped
the daughter of the small shop
owner, how she was the prize—

Now she is somewhere in space
while the rest of us have moved
on to other orbits, other planets—

When I go there now, I see tiny
cracks from which I emerged,
protruding like bone, the spaces
and hollows where I learned to
speak and think and tune down
the doubts in my mind.