Geraniums (A Love Poem)

 

It was that time of year

when potted geraniums on their iron hooks

had turned sad and leggy

(as you were)

when you posed for a Polaroid

in 1972

before I was born

or after my death--

always unclear.

It's like taking a beating underwater,

the way I still feel for you

or might have felt for you--

slow, 

the kind of pain that poppies soothe.

It's an origin story delivered via candle wax arrow

explaining everything

or nothing,

and told by someone's widow, lover, grandmother, daughter.

I make no sense

even to myself

a child scrambling on a broad expanse of lawn chair

or a biddy past caring at the head of my own cortege.

I loved you.

I would have loved you.

I press white lilies between album pages to preserve them

only to find that there is no album, and I have no hands.

You were lovely that day

or had not yet arrived

or had already left

but the geraniums were fresh and pink by way of recompense.

___________

for Word Garden Word List #14 (Pablo Neruda), hosted by the amazing poet Hedgewitch.

Lady H. M. Ainsley-Billington--A Celebratory Retrospective

Lady Hortense MacFarquhar Ainsley-Billington, grande dame of the English stage, is celebrated as much for being as pale and sweet as a blancmange as for her operatic rendering of the timeless classic "When, In Momentary Slumb'r, My Love Doth Recline."

One can scarcely hope to catalog all of Lady Hortense's triumphs in this small space. However, no one will ever forget her command performance at Buckingham Palace when she gave a fist pump upon hitting every note of the impossible five octave "Bobby, Be The Bric-A-Brac On My Curio Shelf," prompting the attending Royals to initiate an instantaneous in-the-aisles hokey pokey break dance such has never been seen before or since.

A month later, once again lucid after an unfortunate episode involving character actor and sometime companion Fredo Pastalini and "just a smidgen" of Chinese opium, Lady H. wowed 'em at the Royal Albert Hall when she sang "My Boy Lollipop" accompanied by a revue of muscular and scandalously (un)clad male dancers. Pausing for a photo-op with Lord Hampstead, Lady H. confided that she was happy all the folderol regarding her tryst with "my little Hamster man" had died down, though of course her referencing it left Lord Hampstead seething and abashed while Lady H. appeared positively smug! 

Interviewed for this article, Lady Hortense opined that, in her view, today's "slipshod copycat noise" cannot hold a candle to the "passion and derring-do" of the electric folk emo metal which first launched her into the limelight. Pontificating quite charmingly on a range of subjects, she reminded this writer time and again of why Edmund Mumzet-Pagliatano bestowed, in Your Evening Calling Card that famous sobriquet "The Sublime Hortense" on our national darling, Lady Ainsley-Billington.  There is no other like her.
____

for Get Listed.