the last rose

The rose’s beauty remains buried in the dark awareness that it has of its inevitable decline. An awareness that is its very being, its unfurling leading to the final wither. 

Its beauty is merely the death that labours in its blossoming.

Roger Munier

tr. by M. Tweed

the gift

she woke me up, proudly holding flowers out to me. she had picked them all pink, of course. seven roses, two more than her age. i took her in my arms and kissed her, but she was obviously bothered by something. i laid the bouquet, delicately sprinkled with little white flowers whose name i didn't know, beside me, and turned to her. it didn't take long before she started to talk. 'you know, i will always look after you', she said. 'i will give you coughing syrup and wrap my shawl around your neck and mouth, and i will give you my winter coat and i will tremble in the cold'.

i felt something like a dark knot in my belly, a pain expanding in my body, but i couldn't react. she continued, quickly: 'you are the most beautiful in the world, nobody is as beautiful as you'. it was already too much, i burst out: 'no, no, this can't be, you are, and even more beautiful'. she looked upset, and brushed my words away, in an almost angry tone which left me no option but silence, again: 'no, don't argue with me. it is you who is the most beautiful'.

she hid her face in her hands: ' i don't want to see the world's face ever again, i only want to look at you'.

no lover has ever told me more beautiful words. i told her that, that nobody, ever, had had such words for me - yet this seemed to throw her further into some kind of distress which at first i didn't understand, she kept repeating, with a growing look of desperation on her face: 'but i don't have any words left to tell about this, how beautiful you are, i can't find any words, what am i going to do now, what?'

suddenly, she stood up, covered her ears with her hands and said, calmly, as if she had reached some definitive conclusion, witnessed an irrevocable truth: 'if there are no more words left for me, then... i'll explode. ' booooom - still covering her ears, she let herself fall on the bed, pretending that she was dead.

only if one looked very carefully, her breath would be visible, gently coming in and out her mouth, trembling for a moment in the air before scattering upon the glimmering roses. only a rose, it struck me amidst my perplexity, such numbness that i couldn't even rise my hand to touch her, only a rose can be without inner combustion, when there are no more words to tell of beauty and love. yet we all forget this truth, as we grow up, and the art of exploding, the only one which could give the real measure of our being, is forever lost.

.

first poem for Miriam

you used to read poems to me

while the summer heat lingered

on our skin, like honey.

sometimes, you would fall asleep

and i would come to your body like a thief,
like that thief of roses whose bones,
bleached and glittering, are still
to be found in the garden
long after the unspeakable struck.

in b&w and more
here



..

december roses

A few December roses, still,
Roses, real roses, with little fragrance,
All petals, heavy, satiny petals.
It was important not to stop talking. For
The poem was still the poem, for
You couldn't do anything else
With your body.

Henri Deluy, from Carnal Love
tr. Guy Bennett

.

late autumn garden (2)

not enough tears
to sing the countless
deaths within

.
.

divination in the late autumn garden

the ancients used to draw 卜 and 口
a crack in a tortoise shell and a mouth
told of the future hidden
in the bones of the translucent dead.

the cracks in my waters, the mouth of time lost
the bones of time found
they reveal everything except your silence.

the wind blows and scatters my roses
a handful of petals
upon my waters, upon your silence.

note:

占, pictograph made of the two radicals 卜 (cracks in the tortoise shells used for divination) and 口 (mouth, to say), means "to tell someone's fortune, to predict, to divine".


.
.

...

i cannot set the sky ablaze for you.
i am neither the sun of poetry nor its mystery
(as for centuries many have claimed).
but i can set my roses ablaze for you
and the word 'roses'
and the silence of its burning
once more
until the emptiness is filled
with all the roses that have ever been
and all the roses that might ever be.
(no emptiness can ever contain the roses
that should have been -
only my body, ablaze).

almost lips

Roses
Presque lèvres
Presque corps,

Roses,
Plus que fleurs,
Presque porte à l'entrée
Du corps qu'on touchera,

Près de vous je sais mieux
Ce que c'est que des lèvres
Et ce qu'apporte un corps.


Eugène Guillevic

Roses,
almost lips,
almost bodies,

Roses,
more than flowers,
almost the entrance
to the body I will touch,

Near to you I learn
what lips are
and what makes a body.

(tr. Teo Savory)

my deep red in the mood for Cohen's ambiguous green

Leaving Green Sleeves (Leonard Cohen)

into the rose garden

I have been tagged by Mansuetude, the one who resides at the heart of peace, to post 'a phrase: a few lines from a poem, a song, or an overheard sentence that rings important inside you'. I thank her for that and I will certainly play the game, because one of my souls is a player's one. My choice won't surprise anybody, I have reason to fear, I had already posted these lines before and everybody who has come to know me a little knows that they are crucial to me.

I don't know if I should pass this tag onward... does anybody want to continue playing like this? I'd be happy to read your choice. Still, I will name three people, but they don't have to do anything if they don't feel like it (most probably Kubla won't feel like it, I can't imagine him play): Edith, Sorlil, Kubla and the Black Sun (b, just because I'd hate to dwell alone on these fertile fields of predictability, I give you the possibility not to surprise anybody with another wonderful Salter quote :-P, and yes, I know I know, again, forgive me for what was once known as my wicked tongue).

After this quite long introduction, let me lead you to the never opened door, into the rose garden, once again.

What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.










Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

T.S. Eliot, Quartet No. 1, Burnt Norton

and look at me now

I entered into him as into a rose garden. Young and spoiled, fluttering my black tides, my hair undone, my dance unfolding into the evening maze which was his. Easy the way out, I thought back then, I will teach the garden to surrender, the thorns to be soft on my thighs, the scents to need me, the time to be good and behave. And look at me, look at me now, after so many years, you who sit out there at your small tables and eat your dinners and make love to your wives and put your children to bed, all that quiet breathing in and out of 'life', or what you have decided to call as such. Barely alive, my dance folded back into the evening maze which is still his, I wait for the garden to let me out, I beg the time to 'resume his course', or what you have decided that time usually does.

There is no such thing as a merciful rose, I have learned, I who had thought to be the teacher, the imperial sister, the courtesan with the cruelest smile. He forgets that I am still there, I am sure of it. Only at times, when he talks matter-of-factly about the autumn of his soul and nobody can make out if he is serious or not, as it often happens, I wonder if he doesn't mean me.

her flesh opened up, her mutiny futile.

the rose is not.

what are you doing to me, she says.

don't.

the floating. the dark thorns of dreams.

The rose that shouldn't be 

longs to become.

And the night flowed back into the rose.

And she flowed back into the soft curve of her death. 

The Rondel of the Dying Roses

E vremea rozelor ce mor,
Mor în grădini, şi mor şi-n mine --
Ş-au fost atât de viaţă pline,
Şi azi se sting aşa uşor.

În tot, se simte un fior.
O jale e în orişicine.
E vremea rozelor ce mor --
Mor în grădini, şi mor şi-n mine.

Pe sub amurgu-ntristător,
Curg vălmăşaguri de suspine,
Şi-n marea noapte care vine
Duioase-şi pleacă fruntea lor --
E vremea rozelor ce mor.

Alexandru Macedonski

(Rondelul rozelor ce mor)

It is the time when roses die,

They die in gardens, and in me -

They were so full of life and glee,

And now they droop with a faint sigh.

Through everything cold shivers fly.

Despondency's in all we see.

It is the time when roses die -

They die in gardens, and in me.

Beneath the dismal twilight sky

There eddies many a faint sigh;

And towards the long night to be

They gently bend their heads so shy -

It is the time when roses die.

Tudor Gheorghe sings this poem:
here

summer evening

I was lying on my dark blue sofa, a book forgotten on my side or perhaps none, I couldn't tell any longer. The room was full of flowers, the whole week strangers had been offering me flowers everywhere I went, I had accepted them shyly in the beginning but then I had got accustomed to it, every time I was on the street and an unknown face suddenly appeared beside me, I spontaneously reached out for the bouquet.

The room was full of flowers, mostly roses, white and red, imperial lilies, fresh and moist. My skin was glowing, the window wide-open, my shoulder thin and wounded before the tired evening wind. In that special quality of the air one might have called 'light' if words hadn't already turned into golden pollen, the objects seemed to float around me and I, breathing, I, alive and strangely replenished with dreams, was suddenly the shadow they cast on memory. And then a petal fell. Somewhere in the room, I couldn't tell which vase out of the myriads I had been growing around me in their warm clay, a heavy petal fell, a rustle went through the leaves, the silence broke.

I startled as if in sleep, I shuddered, as if someone had been there, watching me all the time.

the rose for him, the perfect one maybe, because it was the only one tamed. tell me nothing of the changeless and the eternal, sings the poet, and her body is a running flame, emerging and flowing off. in the misty mirror, her most precious gift, she tries to see the invisible. her beauty contemplates itself, her being faces the non-being. gold glimmer on her white skin. in the ageless mirror, time is lurking on its knees.

"I'll never make it tonight.
no trapeze in full moon nights.
once again, night falls in my head. Fear. Fear of death.
Why not death?
The only important thing sometimes is just being beautiful"

already there is a flutter of wings on the other side of the world.

she doesn't know yet. his gaze, from behind the glass.

oh tell me, why have you changed in the space of a night? what are fifteen seconds when we dance in the space of the mirror, when our time is the time of the world before the world? take the rose, it's for you. hold my hand. I am afraid. the dark reflection. is it you?

the shadow moves, the wings open up, the snow glows, he becomes her mirror.

she thinks that if she wishes hard enough for something it might come true. a child, after all. she lifts her hand, unfolding the rose into the waters of the invisible world. will the hand reach back to her?

on the other side of the mirror, his tired wings, covered with ashes. she holds her breath and tries to listen, to listen hard enough to all the whispers of the earth. before even knowing it, she listens to his silence, flooding her from the backside of the mirror, flowing into her thoughts like a river in dim moonlight. she listens to the death within life, to the life within death. soon enough, the last circus show. where are the clowns, she wonders. where are you? am I alive? is this real? she talks to herself:

"You're not blind yet. Your heart is still beating. And now you're crying".

her fear of nights which are not the sun, of wounds, of frozen cristals, of dying roses, of re-vision, of lances quivering there still today, thousands years after being thrown against the tree. her desire for nights which are not the sun, for skies remembered, for broken shells and praying flesh, for lances quivering there still today, in the thousand-year-old heart of the tree.

what she doesn't know yet, is that on the other side of the mirror:

he is already
falling
out of grace,
darkening
heavier and heavier
falling into her
deep down
falling away
from her
a dead star




in her sleep, she moves like a golden ocean. in her dream the longing - only human, after all - for words that have never been spoken before, floating between the moon and the earth:

"Something happened

It is still going on

It binds me

It was true at night, and it's true in the day

Even more so now

Who was who?

Who in the world can claim that he was ever together with another being?

I am together

It happened once

Only once, and therefore forever.

The picture that we have created will be with me when I die.

I will have lived within it."

im Gewitter der Rosen

Wohin wir uns wenden im Gewitter der Rosen,
ist die Nacht von Dornen erhellt, und der Donner
des Laubs, das so leise war in den Büschen,
folgt uns jetzt auf dem Fuß.

Wo immer gelöscht wird, was die Rosen entzünden,
schwemmt Regen uns in den Fluß. O fernere Nacht!
Doch ein Blatt, das uns traf, treibt auf den Wellen
bis zur Mündung uns nach.

Ingeborg Bachmann, Im Gewitter der Rosen

Wherever we turn in the storm of roses,
the night is lit up by thorns, and the thunder
of leaves, once so quiet within the bushes,
rumbling at our heels.

Wherever the fire of roses is extinguished,
rain washes us into the river. O distant night!
Yet a leaf, which once touched us, follows us on waves
towards the rivers' mouth.

In the Storm of the Roses,
translated by Peter Filkins

Où que nous allions sous l’orage de roses
la nuit est éclairée d’épines, et le tonnerre
du feuillage, naguère si faible dans les buissons,
est maintenant sur nos talons.

Où toujours on éteint ce qu’enflamment les roses
la pluie au fleuve nous emporte. Ô nuit plus lointaine !
Une feuille pourtant, qui nous toucha, sur les ondes dérive
derrière nous jusqu’à l’embouchure

Dans l'orage des roses,
Traduit de l’allemand par Francoise Retif

above all the withered ones late at night, when the veil of sorrow falls down on bed and mirror alike, on wild-weathery girls and ripening truths

roses are not red and the sky is not blue