"Seeds" by Noel Sloboda

[audio mp3="http://barnstormjournal.org/content/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/sloboda3.mp3"][/audio]All that summer my brother collected John Milton's teeth. He had heard at college thatwhile Shakespeare was the most popular poet, Milton was the most refined. My brotherfelt if he could establish a link to this great man of letters, it would lend him an air ofdistinction. The teeth had gone on the market back in 1790, following the desecrationof Milton's grave. My brother found several places online purportedly selling the teeth.I was sure most of what he bought was fake. In several specimens you could make outwhat looked like a maker's stamp or carver's initials. Four or five of the teeth definitelycame from animals. But there was one tooth that was such a pure white you could almostbelieve it came from a genius. That tooth became the centerpiece of the collection, andmy brother was sure to tell anybody who would listen about its impressive pedigree. Heplanned to make a necklace out of the tooth, to keep it close. Then that tooth started topurple. Although my brother maintained this was just something that naturally happenedto aging enamel, we could all tell he was crushed. Before he went back to school in fall,he buried the teeth in the garden. He never said anything more about them. Yet wheneverhe came home during vacations, he would go out back and stand by the burial plot—as ifexpecting something special might one day grow there.Noel Sloboda's work has recently appeared in Harpur Palate, Sentence, Gertrude, Rattle, and Modern Language Studies. He is the author of the poetry collections Shell Games (sunnyoutside, 2008) and Our Rarer Monsters (sunnyoutside, 2013) as well as several chapbooks. Sloboda has also published a book about Edith Wharton and Gertrude Stein. He teaches at Penn State York.