1
Eyes opening, uncertain time in a different zone,
Walked still trailing sleep to the window by your deck
Where you watched the day writing itself
In lengthening lines of light, each of us awakening
In different ways, my squandered dreams

From last night’s tossing burned away
In the sun’s slow firing,
Still sighted through their shadows
But little left of what they had sewn,
Vague, and, in pleasant ways I never remember,

Inconsequential, slow dissolving leaving me
Neither calm nor worry, slate wiped as clean
As the soft emoting sky above your head,
Clouds exiting stage left. You sat alone
In your copyright of past, present, future,

But perhaps our separate lives could shelve
Both our libraries of experience,
Interleaving on the folio of the forming hour,
Some new play of our perceptions
From true copies of what had gone before.

2

And I entered, eager to hear what you were seeing
Without thinking of your private right
To the day you were creating there alone,
And you looked surprised to see me freed of
The grip of my own sleeping story,
But we waded into the stream of each other’s speech
As easily as summer bathers, and quickly we began
To describe the same things we saw in different ways,
Cape Cod undraped in dark pastels under a squinting sun,
Rising light waxing the pines and oaks below us,

Revealing your tales of other times
When ice sheathed the same branches in another shine,
Other nights when, just to lie closer to the stars,
You pitched a tent on the wooden planking
Where my feet now rest, breathing the same piney air
Sharpening now in me, listening to your past
In a day still unsure of itself, still feeling its way
Out of the sea on the edges of our sight,
As they did long ago, starved and sneaking,
Stealing corn the Wampanoag had offered to their dead,
Mistaken mariners surprised in the drowning,
Desperation, shipwreck, disease, massacre and revenge,
Stories long sown and plowed to silence in the ground below
While our innocent remembering drifts among the salted trees,
Past plaited into present, histories rising from the dark.

(First published in Last Leaves #8, Spring 2024. Thanks to the editors.)