Something that could give me gifts, plentiful, naughty, delicious.
Peppers, I decided. Rows of them just off the truck, labeled,
Huddled in planters, surging from stems stiff as springs,
Fragile birthers fated to begin. I confined one on my patio,

Pregnant in scruffy leaves, green pods burst into red hearts,
That flirty curve at the tip – wanton wink of artistry,
Growth with sexy grace that made cutting it seem almost wrong,
Pain’s pleasure finally bought and paid for. I bit,

Tongue’s buds aroused in expectation, caressing
The old seasons. My searching mouth, thrilling with the sting
Of peppers from the past, but tasting only tepid whispers
From what seemed to have gone wrong in the growing.

Cloistered in my quickened calendar,
Did it lag behind each sun, mistake the moon’s light?
Root tips, feeling along the hard, unsolvable curve –
Was there confusion, some strange sadness? Or impossible to thrive

In my starved imagination, shaky scaffolding
Of what had happened long before? What pepper could conform

To my blueprint for all good things to be?
Only white scabs where I broke their grip on home,

Bold colors bleached away,
Water choked in shrinking stalks,
A slow, unscripted exit,
The last ones too small
For my plotted summer romance,

Tiny skulls
In my tight fist.

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

The church bells rang on the hill above my house
While the children played below.

The youngest from another neighborhood
Asked me what it was.

“That’s the monster alarm,” I said.
“It’s how we know when the monsters come.”

And I must admit
To my pride in the look that passed among them,

And I must confess
To a power in the silence of their trusting,

Having led them to the frontier of
My tremendous lie,

Rearing on its haunches,
Darkening our sky.

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

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.)