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Harry Calhoun |
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A guest in the house of winter for Trina Luck is the dark heart of the bargain, the mulberry Zinfandel rich but bequeathed seldom and in small batches. I would never have waited up late for you earlier on. But now my heart squawks with the light happy lilt of the morning rooster. I wonder why you have placed this fireplace in the midst of my chilly unlit life, made me a guest in the house of winter. I wonder why you snap like the cold- to-warm crackle of splitting firewood up my spine, light up my old heart like a jack-o-lantern toothy with a grin that melts in autumn's oven and drifts like the last red leaf of November into a soft pile of orange- and pink sunset clouds. Sadness is what's in the sunset. You came to me and now I never remember Looking so good in browns or drinking dark musky wines comfy on my worn mossy couch in this late sweet bliss of slight corrupt Shiraz drunkenness. I started writing this old backbroken aged small vineyard harvest of a poem near three decades ago, only now you bring cotton candy and vermilion to all my sunrises and sunsets, light my winter sundusk sepia depths sparkling with the hope of the green speckled Christmas tree, rising majestic in my heart as you turn to me, yes in our very bed, warm as the soul of a dark comforting claret, my comfort, sublime as cognac and a string quartet in the attic at just the right shaded time of night, but every day of the year through the shifting of the dark and the light. Luck is the treat in the feast, this luck that brought you to me, Santa constant in sunrise and warm every day. Leaves don't fall just for the hell of it. You are beside me because why would we be anywhere else? I finally squeezed out this wavering orange flame of a poem, atop the waning candle that used to burn at both ends. We will spend the rest of our days warm; your dark winy love fortifies me through thunderstorms, on the briny beaches, across the solemn seas. Late-blooming Marigolds I Up to October Trina teased me. My Dollar Tree marigolds refused to bloom. "You get what you pay for," she said, but my hope stayed strong as the barren green stalks reaching up to the mailbox as if begging deliverance from the fool who planted them so late. But wait. Through October my folly turned to gold as jade whorls of budlet capped themselves with blooms. Early November and I am drinking in the heady yellow and carroty wine of their flowers. Sunshine blossoms reward my patience. Smiling is easy. II My mother says I can't come home for Thanksgiving. She says she has dizzy spells and cannot keep up with the cleaning. My marigolds blossomed in old age but my mom never blossomed young. Too busy with frets and threats and trapped in the sterile soil of discontent, the bulb of her unhappiness sending forth no shoots, let alone blooms that may have made me happy. The marigolds cost me a buck and two minutes to plant and paid off on the investment. I've shelled out a lifetime of fear and hurt feelings and never gotten that much. III Autumn has come to North Carolina on my drive to work today. Orange and golden ghosts emerging brave among the full-bodied green, leafy cowboys with color-guns blazing, now stepping into the chill stream of winter where piranha strip them to the leafless skeleton. The hues hark back to the marigolds, with a little red thrown in, reminding me of blood thicker than the ice my mother passes off as love. There are the leaves, bright and defiant against certain death, there is the easy cheap elation of dollar-store marigolds launching variegated flags before the frost. What to think when plants, pinned to the cycle of the seasons, Are dumbly, steadfastly brave? While my mother's old age is spent doddering in her choices, not bright or basking in the sun, but imprisoned with no hope of parole in the shadowed musty clutter of a house in disarray. |