Bemused

For My Lover-
Life Stilled: Fruit, Flowers, Fauna

“And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been”- TS Eliot, East Coker

Prologue:

Smart and classy French piano jazz
floats around/above a dreamy evening
of cold Pinot Grigio and kumquats.

Morning:

Three lemons bathe in
a shifting parallelogram of sun
spilt through a sky light
onto a walnut kitchen table.
I photograph them and later
present them to my lover
who deftly quarters them
for our bedside drinking water.

Mountain bound breakfast stop.
She bends a low limb down
and exposes me, up close,
to the lush aroma and plush flesh
of year round magnolia blooms.

Afternoon:

On the ascent I am taught
to identify and savor the
subtleties of the delicate
unfurling shoots of certain ferns,
referred to as têtes de violon
in her native tongue.

Near the peak a single spar
of denuded pine thrusts itself,
among its more needled neighbors,
into the sun’s delicious slant-
a stark, live, surviving thing.


Breakfast:

I set the table while my lover sleeps:
French press coffee, cantaloupe,
plain yogurt, strong cheeses, toast
and a pair of thick ceramic bowls-
one containing fresh picked raspberries,
the other that same fruit’s flowers
floating in Spring-cool snowmelt creekwater.