These Peonies

 

These Peonies

Campobello, New Brunswick June 15, 2024

 

The heads of the peonies are still

and stiff, an intentional fist.  And they drip

 

with what remains of the rain.  If I went out

alone and leaned in seeking to

 

see I’d see what isn’t seeable wouldn’t I. 

Wouldn’t I?  Watch for me because

 

my back is facing the bay: the fog is

lifting and being blown into the distant

 

cove and back out again.  It comes to rest

on the shoulders of the old homes sloping

 

alone in their timber bones with nobody

(though coons count, right? or birds in her

 

rafters, yeah?) proposing ‘hello’. Still, inside

this living house a woman sleeps, at last, and maybe

 

deeply.  Her numerous peonies, yet shut, slow-

sway, and wait on the whim of the wind. 

 

It’s enough for the drop of water to want

its spot & to squat on the furled edge

 

of the petal. I watch it ripple, and twitch, still

balanced on the ball.  I watch it quicken

 

in the rhythm of the pick-up truck rumbling

past.  I am, yearning in a way the patient

 

yearn, not surprised by the thin river

of air that moves up from my chin

 

to my eye in this one drop of water where

I watch my momentarily bloated

 

face.  It is as if this simple drop

is watching me watch it from the surface.

 

Inviolate yet while shaking, this little ripple

on a gripped fist lets me, held breath held,

 

beckon nothing but the broad black ant

called upon, the wives say, by nothing more

 

than the pleasure of the pleasing water dredged

from her stalk to bead sweet on the hem

 

of that yet peeled-back blossom, how it is

nectar and something entirely more than

 

nectar, rising from the dark of a place

we could only ever be if our sole intention

 

were flourishing the flourishing of these

peonies.