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.