ISSUE 06   ||   FALL / WINTER 2009

Stoichiometry

Iris A. Law

On my first morning home, I stumble downstairs
to find that my father has left me a note
on the kitchen table. Your favorite,
he's scrawled, and beside it, he's left me
an avocado, small and odd-shaped, out of season,
a fruit whose name he always mispronounces,
Avogadro, like the chemical constant, 6.02 x 10^23,
the number of units that make up a mole.

He used to tutor me on Saturdays at his lab:
simple stoichiometry – the universe in balance.
You could have a mole of anything, he said: of salt,
of water, of apples, of moles –  more Avogadro's.
I went home and dreamed a sea of California fruit,
dark tops turned upward, filling the room with their soft,
leathery bodies the size of a giant's eggs.

Today I halve my winter avocado and spoon
out its pale green flesh, sprinkle it with salt,
extract and save the pit. Its taste of reminds me
of school, of sun baking red-tiled roofs, but also
of childhood daydreams: a field sown through
with a mole of moles, round orbs taking
simultaneous root, my father tending a row
of spear-leaved saplings heavy with early fruit.