Immortelles
Strawflower
memories long picked,
so
delicate now, desiccated, thin,
pale lime rose as sunset gathers thick--
I
hold them pressed within my shadow book
petal
by paper petal flat and dry,
pastel
on the final page as a fading sigh.
An
eyebrow here above an eye of gold,
there
a curving wave of steelhard hip
fiddlehead
stringing a twine of vining leg
light
as terry toweling loosely rolled,
white
where you put it once in trust to sleep
across
my waist when time was sounding deep.
I
examine every rescued immortelle
with
eyes for fingers before it slips to dust,
float
it from the place it marks like stone;
put
away the ochre stain, the dark blood's rust,
the
thorns, the weeds, the rocksalt wellspring floods--
I
turn the pages past to reach sealed buds,
choose
their morning cinnamon skin anew,
smell
the amber warmth spill periwinkle blue
from
where I sit being plundered by the roots.
Under
the sunblind everlasting sky, ruffled faces
open upward, delicate, alive: my song decked
strawflower
memories, long picked.
~April 2012, revised January 2013
Fireblossom Friday
Challenge:Doubletalk
The
ever-amazing Fireblossom is like Ike and Tina, she never does nothin' 'nice and
easy.' This time, she wants us to begin and end a poem with the same line, yet
make the meaning totally different in each case. Yeesh. I've been up all night
trying to get this one right.
Process
note: immortelle — n everlasting , Also called: everlasting
flower: any of various plants, mostly of the family Asteraceae
(composites), that retain their colour when dried, esp Xeranthemum annuum
~World
English Dictionary
Header Image: Immortelles, by Stefan Lucian
Shared
under a Creative Commons Attribution Only License
