Roses In January

Mike Essig
Jul 28, 2017 · 2 min read
LiveInternet

Memory is a palace always under construction…

Memory is a palace always under construction…

Consider roses in January. Your thoughts
will not yield anything substantial, only
memories of ghost blossoms, an unstated
promise of colors that might, perhaps return.

January’s roses exist only in the mind’s eye
whose vision is rarely ever twenty twenty:
memory remembering the perfect imperfectly.

And so it is with details of life remembered.

Outlines emerge from the foggy past.

A birthmark on a moist, luscious thigh.
The howitzer strike of first love at sixteen.
Acres of lavender fields near Provence.
The deadly, delicate filigree of shrapnel.
Holding your child for the first time.
A hazy period of drugs, music, possibilities.
The baby you delivered in a wounded chopper.

So much time digested like a rich meal.

Now it is January in your faltering mind.
How many brush-strokes added to each painting?
How real is the reality of long ago?
The living brain creates as much as recalls.

Suck in a draft of deep, gelid, winter air.
Consider the flowers that were and are,
aromatic, hypnotic, desired, but uncertain.
The roses of January as they might have been
but painted over with hopeful flourishes.

Life is an ever unfinished work of art.

You are its old, arthritic painter, always
touching up, a dab here, a detail there,
whose palsied fingers shake but never cease.

The roses of January born and born again.


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A sanctuary for orphaned poems and prose.

Mike Essig

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