The Princess Recounts The History Of Roses In A Picture Book Left At Versailles

[to Isak Dinesen.

and to the word "roseate"

to Poetry, itself, as it once was]

only one colour from the Palace of Versailles

I could have lived in till I died

requiring little else. the princess cried,

intensifications of the Rose

and lavish as a last sunset

as if all roses in the rose gardens of the world

were swept by rains from a deluge

of the Beautiful before my door
 and something in me sad

yearned beyond yearning itself

for what would not return

because we had banished it.

the arcane perfumes of it

in the foiled Spring diminishing

crimson by Crimson's cost and Crest

peach by pearled peach furled.

all carmine lost from the world

with their coronas-

as Christ was, from our sight...

the rubied Heart still streaming

an irreproachable Love

and so they sighed, the flowers,

crushed velvets their flower faces

pressed to the dust of our modernity

though you may say it

was only the bell haunted winds

hunting Christmas

in the Rose legends of

the world, the heart caught

on its own Diamond and torn,
 relinquishing something

no longer met by trains

(or with bunches of lilies)-

unless by certain children

who would not leave

the opalescent mud puddles-

rainbow stained, themselves,

(lost shimmer of Chartres);
 every jeweled thing

or the saints no longer believed in,

their aureoles

scuffed like old shoes

so that otherwise, my pearl,

only the names of roses-

regal as they were

in old seed catalogues remained for us,

oh God, mere stem of the language

I once loved

worn down.

the Crayon's  stub.

mary angela douglas 7-8 may 2014;rev. 17 november 2014