Exercise in Metaphor

Exercise in Metaphor

Under the trashcan my rosemary lies, concealed to

endure bleeding hell in this intractable garden,

so far removed from your wild conception as a weed

for Aphrodite’s aromatic cloak, spun of the sky god’s seed,

living dew of that Attic sea from which the goddess rose

before Athens, white limbed and cold as fear.

You were her mantle of living warmth, austere.

You lived on sea spray and sun in the maritime dunes,

wild and free as the piping of Pan.

Your  needles mimic tongues philosophers ran

standing where grey pillars capped words of gold

now debased and traded from your native land.

You eke out your life a  commodity of man

in each fold of this foreign world that seeks your savor,

still giving your pale shy flowers to each rutting bee.

Here you’re made to stand against the burning dree

of American days, feet bound in clay unaccounted,

damped with calcareous tepid water shorn of salt.

When hard times come, I cage and darken you in a vault,

make you winter a cold that wracks your bluegreen bones.

Wind sucks them dry and bleeds you like a blade.

Still in death you give what’s asked from what you’ve made,

that undying and remembrance laden scent

that releases mnemonic prisoners from their cells.

But all’s forgotten now of what your fragrance tells;

how once you were the herb of bygone alchemists

boiled to bouillion in precise alembic wells;

for sweet union men once begged those body-spells.

Your arms were crowns in countless high endeavors.

Even crushed in death your juniper lingers.

Tonight the front freights down with frozen fingers.

Blue express of oblivion, dark wailing wind.

Across millenniums still the sky god gives and takes.

I bind you in  burlap, secure the shroud it makes,

cover you with a  plastic catafalque

meant for the dregs and detritus I buy,

and your last freedom, daughter of the sky,

is to choose if it’s better to live like this or die.

January 2011 

This is my entry for OneShotWednesday, at the inimitable OneStopPoetry

Image 1: West Front of the Parthenon, Edward Dodwell, 1821, Views from Greece. 

Source: wikimedia commons.

Image 2: Rosemarinus officianalis

Source: wikimedia commons