T. S. Eliot’s Rose Garden
Let me linger a little while longer among the roses.
Their dulcet smiles sedate me; cocoon me in
coral lullaby. Thinking floats on a soporific ocean.
Inhale, one lung. Then blink
on uncombed branches lacerating the glassy sky:
Harp strings echoing an overture
to private symphony.
Memory exhales, whispering her gossamer glance
over petals’ oyster eyelids. Morning tears
pearled in ambrosial embrace:
“Look up!”, serenaded the roses,
Saccharine cheeks charged with dawn. A satin
choreography of seraphic laughter that
palpitated over vegetable romance.
N’était-elle pas belle, cette vie en rose !
But Memory absconds the nest. Fickle,
phantom heir of Pythia, slipping through my
fingers’ watery cage. Eclipse loiters on the
broken horizon. Faintly clear.
Was the glass half-full? Or Sunlight at her sickest:
So much imbibed that branches blurred; a
sultry Past cast beneath a quivering rosy cloud.
Which colours did I forget?
Twist the kaleidoscope and the constellation shatters
(Gravity’s heavy indeed). Gates rasp closed.
Tout ce qui fleurissait finira par se flétrir.
Time’s acrid breath will writhe and gnaw, clawing
inky smoke-stained petals now too tired
to. At all. So heads will sink in mute surrender,
Trodden into bindweed curtesy; ashen faces
will withdraw, weeping dusty pearls once more.
No thrush, but nightingale: its ribcage song
singed and stark, and falling, too—
Too loud—too bright! I can’t hear beyond
these echoes: feet fall too fast, too far. Fractured branches
ebb defenceless; clouds swarm thick and viscous;
Roses dizzy in Life’s psychedelic orbit. Backward, forward,
Round and rounder still—let go!
Is it? Was it? Would it? Will it?
Symphonic silhouettes amid limpet fog.
No: no bridge could hold us.
I’ll inhabit these echoes—or must they inhabit me?