Bourbon Headstones

Tomato plants grow readily by the kitchen door where sometimes we throw the rotten ones.  We pick sweet, red Valley Girls and eat them like apples. Juice and seeds drip onto your sun dress and I laugh. We walk to the concrete weir in the creek. You stand on top and the water surrounds your ankles like May mists embraces beech trunks. I splash, thigh-deep, in the pool below. Water bugs skip away. Willows siphon shaded eddies near the banks and a woodpecker wobbles through the sky. You ask questions I never answer. I splash you and you quiver in frustration and excitement. “Love” is something we never say. Instead we climb trees with stolen tomatoes and hide buttons under stones in the garden. We are a prediction like rainbows after thunderheads and everyone knows so. Sometimes I do say, “love,” in halted syllables against the kitchen door where the rotten ones are thrown. But never to you.