I lost perspective inside a glass where light specked the rim and stem.
In the grasp of an elixir’s fume, heady visions blurred a memory stream rolling the former incarnations of ourselves above the candle beneath the rose: younger hands, one soft elastic skinned balmy palm cupping a glass while the other two-finger rubbed a furrowed brow far less ravaged with ravines and splotches.
We were four then, you, me and the girls, sitting tensely at the table, your anxiety spewing noxious gases until we began to dance a lovely quadrille atop the table.
No, but that couldn’t be true.
These ghosts danced smeared putty-stretched hug-tight to the glass’ girth.
Passing cars flashed illuminated dusty rays sprayed across the windows outside, inflicting tenderness and wince.
Accidental brush of your thin, gruff finger tips across mine startled us both awake, forcibly focusing my lenses to the doubly reflected salt and pepper shakers, standing table top like four drunken rooks bent and leaning on a checker-less board,
While we two dined alone, each lost in enclosed grapey reverie, the candle light flickered the final scene ere the first course’s arrival:
Two of us, illusions backlit against scattered chronometric flares melting us buttered like toast and figs, foie gras oily on a tongue awash in Muscat, scalloped leeks across cellular cerebral connections as numerous as galaxy stars.
“Let me see that label,” I commanded.
“It’s a 2006 Pomerol,” he offered, “a very good year and it has a pleasant nose” and then we once again alit on common ground.
GeminiĀ
Gemini’s bloom, neither starry aster nor royal poinsettia
seasons too late for the rose of summer skies.
One dies brightly, late fall’s supernova, while another paints icy lips ruby.
Your velvet blush pairs story-eyed girls with breathless boys re-enacting everlasting joy;
unrevealed how your Bristly Roseslug Cladius difformis and red spider mite underside,
laced and aching,
cache closes the thin divine like children threading hearts to paper clips in kinder class.
Honored sister, pour your swooning sorrow into my hands and let your brave face die.
No man, beast or garden silk delivered so much to so many for so long.
Release the weight of your beatific crown, heavy with curved care, and sink.
Another June will call your name in vein-flow some day soon.
credit: flikr.com
Roses of Song and Myth: the Love Lie
Credit: http://assets2.madewithcolor.com/2014/08/11/17/57/30/934/Marigold_Rose_3.jpg
The rose is not flattery, nor flattered can she be.