John Repp
Running Past Lloyd & the Peepers
Once upon a time, I ran through the squeal-whistle shrill
of the peepers past what had always been Lloyd’s trailer
& the field across the road where last July 4 Lloyd chased
his screaming, near-naked kids with a lawn tractor belching
blue smoke in the roiling midst of which I waved to Lloyd
& his oblivious kids & his wife waving as she roasted
five hot dogs pierced with pointed sticks (each braced
on a three-brick stack), the all-but-dead bonfire billowing
smoke that nearly obscured the untrimmed-log addition
Lloyd had joined to the trailer by means of a wizardry
forever beyond me. In a may-as-well-be-mythical time,
I’d come home after a complicated time away to run past
a bearded someone feeding Lloyd’s fire pit trash bags
swollen with what seemed clothes or bedding, an oily,
reeking swirl of turbid smoke-devils enveloping me
as I waved at the oblivious stranger & never broke stride,
the peeper-squeal filling the woods that within a dozen
footfalls crowded the roadsides again. Lloyd’s panel van
didn’t tilt in the two-track, nor did his tractor squat
under the lean-to. The three stumps he pulled a spring ago
to make more garden still lay by the drainage ditch
& I never again saw anyone on that plot of ground.
