No White Rose Here

NO WHITE ROSE HERE


A week ago there was a white rose
In a white vase
Placed on the slab, white marble,
That covers my coffin.
The white rose was placed
On the slab by mistake.
Some girl thought my grave
Was the grave of her dead lover,
Her lover
Who had died from AIDs.
Her hand shook, she
Spasmodically cried
When she placed the white rose
On the wrong slab.
The white rose is wilted now,
A brown, stiff stem
Whose skin is peeling away
To a new whiteness.
The petals, the leaves
Have fallen, are gone.

But I long for Cressid,
I know she is in the arms of Diomed,
But I still love Cressid.

While longing for the return
Of Cressid,
I had a vision, a vision
That I was Boethius
Translating Aristotle into Latin.
My now sepia, skeletal hand
Held a peacock-feathered pen
That dripped drops
Of dark gold ink.

My Boethius, or my Troilus,
Or my Cruson Ronn translation

Was copied on an ivory-tinted
Rough-textured, rice scroll.
While copying calligraphically
In dark gold ink, I had the insight
That my name while I existed
On earth among the living dead
Was Cruson Ronn, I was a lawyer
Like Franz Kafka who worked
For an insurance company,
Not in Prague, but in
Mobile, Alabama.

I lived not in Ancient Greece,
Ancient Rome, but during
The Dark Ages
When learning was discredited
And ridiculed,
When poetry, art, and music
Were unknown,
I lived during the twentieth-century.

I preferred not to be Cruson Ronn,
Lawyer for an insurance company,
I preferred to be Troilus
In an ancient age when love existed,
Longing for Cressid,
Or Boethius translating Aristotle
Into Latin.

So now freed from the living dead,
I sat on a raw wood stool
Translating into Latin, Aristotle,
My Latin, pure, discreet, No Tully,
Cicero, Ulpian at their best.

But even in death there are
Vestiges from when alive
Among the living dead
To pollute the purest intentions.
The Freudian pleasure principle

Transmogrified my pledge of purity.
My translations became
Subjective annotations,
Solipsistic commentaries,
Even decks of playing cards
Shuffled by Proclus
And cut by Plotinus.

Another Neo-Platonist,
Ammonius, stared
Over my shoulder.
His elbow bone
Had become dislocated
And scraped against
My backbone.
Gazed at the hand of cards
I held and signaled
The contents to my opponents.
But being cheated
Did not upset me
Now that I am dead
As it did when I alive.

The tranquility that Democritus,
Epicurus, Lucretius
Strove so agitatedly to have
Is easy to possess when dead.


Duane Locke

Posted over on Ditch Poetry