Suddenly, a grey September breeze picks up
and throws us into late autumn. I rush around,
gathering anything left— 
the last peppers, lettuce, a handful of basil.

Worried about frost,
my husband carries in the night blooming cereus.
He will pay a price. Since the cancer,
he budgets his strength.

It sits in a large plastic pot on the counter,
its long flat stems barely contained,
a green riot boiling over the edge —
succulent, glossy, muscled with a weightlifter’s veining,

not one plant but all the cuttings that survived 
the long passage through seven moves to this garden,
almost lost in the cold rains of an Oregon spring 
and fist-sized hail in Massachusetts.

Two huge buds dangle like pendulous gonads
fringed with a ring of fleshy sepals.
He thinks they may open tonight.
We wait by the hour the way we would for puppies to be born.

The first bloom goes to our grandchildren 
who come past bedtime, solemn and pajamaed,
to watch its stem lift, aim a bone-white barrel at the room 
and blast us all with luscious, peppery scent.

Their grandfather tells them how at fifteen he traveled by bus
through Brazil, past Eta Peruna to the mountains above Ouro Preto,
how the jungles there are shaggy with cereus,
so many blooming, each for just one night, 

that chaos erupts in nearby towns after dark—
extravagant reunions, wild dancing, fist fights in the city square
all explained away the next day on the effects
of this seductive pheromone.

The last blossom will open too late. He has to sleep,
but we have propped the pot on a chair next to our bed.
As its petals recurve in the dim light
lacy sex pollinates the air above his head.

May it help him walk with remembered ease
down the steps of that bus, through the grassland of the Cerrado
and up into jungle— to bloom again tonight
with a thousand cereus tangled in the trees above.