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The glass is deep blue. Restlessly you clasp it in your hands, again and again return it to the table, pain and discomfort causing you to wheel your chair constantly.
As I take it from you memories seen in depths offer, long gone, a room shared for a rehearsal, a pier blasted by the sea.
Here in your house—wife, daughters, nurse, sun benignly and goldenly sends long slants across the wooden floor. Leaves make a dry swirling in a sudden gust.
It is so intensely and deeply blue the glass your wife bought, that you drink from, that I look into. Is each of our lives our own dream, yours, now longing to be free?
Her eyes slide along the words and over him so tall and gorgeous in his old black shirt sitting on the other side of the room.
The fire burns red but a kind of wall is standing between. Desire curls up and slips back, awash with sadness. She wants to reach out and through but doesn't know how.
He is telling her—if he felt like it, one day, he would suggest going to the sea. He tells her, too much routine is not a good thing.
Could she ever live with him, whose work and life seem to fuse into that living black flame licking behind some big brick wall?
This is how they meet. He unlocks the door. They ascend the stairs. He makes them a cup of tea.
And all her thoughts of him: his dark and searching face, his body—what they have done— and all the fantasies they have
come trailing to the edge and down the deep they fall: words, endearments, desires touching soft as silk.
Summer—. Early morning—. Sky so high, a blue vault of heaven.
Up the flight of stairs, up another flight the desired Romance,
exquisite thick of petal, leads. Along the corridor chequered black by white,
the sparkling of the chandelier lighting dark wood cupboards.
Past the lit chapel, students, stamens in light speaking in God's illumined interior.
-The Romance of the Rose-? From the desk the librarian directs.
Information on thin gossamer secretes, unwinds. The path—amidst the books,
various as hedgerow flowers, leads—barely decipherable, to stairs.
Rooms on long budding stems open. Heads dotted over at tables, display pages.
In the quiet, amidst other French books, The Romance of the Rose,
Europe's fount of romantic love, stands upright. Shimmers in the electric light. |
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