Polar Rose

POLAR ROSE

Your smile flutters, falters and fades,
and your translucent eyelids
turn dull as crumpled tissues
as they crease tight closed:
in a whisper
a mere cough from a whimper
you ask me to leave.

In a voice more fragile than moonbeams
You murmur your sorrow and sinless blame:
your rose is frozen,
cup caged in curled fingers
screened from sight.
How so?
Did a culmination of drear autumn chills
bring this sad and silent stillness
or maybe a flash-frozen wintry finger
fast petrified this bloom.

I move your hand aside, cupped still,
and note a sudden sharpness in your stance.
You will not look with me
upon the tight shut petals
ice-bonded hard and stiff
and though the colours softly bleed
from blush to flame
they are brittle, brittle and over-bright
as though the slightest touch
could crystallise and crumble
or crack and bleed.

Watch. See how I cradle
with two hands, gentle … gentle …
and barely frame this blossom, bend,
open my lips and ‘haaaaah’
my hot and humid breath
across these frosty glacial contours,
and ‘haaaah’ again and again
to free to the very depth
these captive polar convolutions
and soften to silk and satin
these rigid frigid whorls of pain.

It melts! It melts!
Your eyelid’s flicker tells your joy.
The gelid interstices dissolve to dew,
the furls uncurl, open, bloom
and, gasping, gape apart
and give as gift a musk miasma.

My slightest kiss
and lightest travelling tip of tongue
delves deep within the candid coral core:
Ah, the taste, the scent, of surging seas
and a jubilant sunlit summer rose.