In The Roses
Old love is in
the roses,
in the rain today,
falling like
nothing so simple as tears
like milk from the breast, perhaps
of a Gaia that weeps as she smiles
like October, or an old woman
whose cane slides on the vast banana peel
skidding alone to a
pratfall arranged at her birth.
Old love is falling
like rain today
like Rome,
like Tintagel, like
Nagasaki in the nuclear brag.
It hides in the wet roses that
opened sarcastically for Mother's Day,
in the dregs in the cup,
in the twitch on the trigger or a white
rabbit's ear, but never here
in my arms.
Never thin lips
again iron on mine
pulling for more
than I was, than I had,
no matter it dripped like blood
maged from that stone. Never again
the split and slash of your laugh
or your fearless eyes closed,
remiges on my cheek,
the bird's wing
folded.
Old love is in the roses,
in the rain today,
falling dark and wild
as your flyaway hair
flickering my sight
like a falcon
in front of the sun.
May 2023
6 comments:
Whew, a heartful. I heard "Only You" by the Platters way back of this, a pattering cold rain to accompany the elegy. So much gets summoned here and released -- it's Old Love, is it not? But not dead - those roses rouse infernally, touched perhaps by the mage and those remiges (some real magic in both). The poem returns. Hard, hot stuff, speaking to a magnitude broken but deathless.
This hots home on so many levels, my friend. There is the perfect pitch of "nuclear brag" but more so the melancholy and sometimes hardly bearable feeling of having done with the most human needs, and all of it expressed through the idea of the rose in the rain. Only you could have written this.
Oh my word. I have struggle at times in the past to find the right words to offer your astonishingly perceptive writing. This is quite simply epic, in the truest sense of that word. Bringing Arthurian myth, nuclear endings, the cailleach, bittersweet mothering sunday to land as that aged and world beaten rain....tis pure poetic mead. I cried a bucket reading this.
Amazing read, honestly, I basked in that rose comparison, it reminds me of perhaps that moment when we think of some of our innocence, our 'did not know betters' as really, really gone, while it simultaneously feels as though we see them every day. Thank you for sharing the poem.
That Old Love sounds like one deep and magnificent beast. Born long before florist shops… or the naming of things.
Ohhhhhh… Wow. So great. I love the “Old love” refrain (pre-frain? Re-frame?) “nuclear brag” is first rank.
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