LATE SUMMER • AUTUMN • LET'S COZY
UPCOMING ARTICLES
Summer is quickly coming to an end! This autumn I will be writing
several stories including Autumn Reflections and in December,
Grey Holiday in Bath. I start baking gingerbread on late August
Saturday nights; photos of my baking including that for an upcoming
autumn family get-together will be chronicled in
Cozy Photos from Home. My husband and I will be having picnics
at the nearby geodesic home near the
Museum of Life and Science
when cooler weather returns, and upcoming trips to
Edison Johnson
and local cemeteries will be scrapbooked here on my blog. Upcoming
Sad Premonition installments will feature
Elena Hoyos, Dorothy Arnold, Huguette Clark, Connie Converse,
Karen Carpenter, Phyllis Hyman, Fréhel, and
Tammi Terrell.
Absinthe
DAWN
When summer returns and the streets are speckled as lace through leafy canopies, I remember those distant mornings together. Before the rosy dawn turned to cornflower and the afternoon nestled in the eaves, when for a moment it seemed vastness of the morning was ours. And the light of the dawn skimmed through a thousand fountains and hung over our little balcony trimmed in marigolds.
On those mornings I recall the gleam of your eyes bathed in sunlight, when the curve of your face seemed lit with candle glow. And we whispered secrets over café crèmes as the hiss of the phonograph drifted out into the stillness. When your hand felt so warm in mine, and for a moment it seemed we held it all—a world immense as the sea, and alluring as the color of claret. And hand-in-hand we seemed to drift endlessly over the rooftops of our city.
Yet if I knew how empty the streets would seem when you were gone, and how endless these hours—now the stars shine a restless silver glow into the emptiness. For although I held for only a moment the tresses of your hair, tonight they return to me as an endless field, and I wander them alone, remembering you in the moonlight.
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GREYNESS
Sweetness like an old friend that I roll between my fingers, auburn with the warmth of the sun. Languishing beneath the gold and sienna of an ancient harvest, intoxicating and strange its perfume. In my hands I hold the lush of emerald hillsides, sewn with the light of a better day; exotic and bitter and haunting an elixir; mesmerizing lullaby. And when at last among the fireflies of the evening, I get lost among the faces of the street; my city damp and pleasant tinged in the leaves between my fingers, a entire world in the infinite of grey.
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CHRYSANTHEMUM
When I think of what could have been I am filled with the almost tangible sadness of late afternoon, when Durham is aflame at sunset, and the brilliant orange of brick warehouses in the waning light beckons me down empty streets draped in purple shadows. And the crowd has left, and I am sitting in the corner alone with my thoughts, when the city becomes so foreign as I look out across the evening and feel so very small. When the alleyways and the fountains and the spires bobbing up above the waves of rooftops remind me of you, and the courtyard where I would sit echoes with the sound of your laughter.
Our love belongs to the aching loneliness of late summer, when the roses at Merisel have long since faded, and the sound of crickets fill the nights once gilded with a distant music. Our love is the wearied faces of widows on the shore waiting for soldiers who will never return, the tired flags clinging to long-forgotten ghost ships, the carousels sitting empty and silent in the square.
Our love is the sound of the door closing at night, when at last you climb the stairs to an empty house, and you are filled with the realization that you are alone in all the world. I think of you in the evenings over the dirge of mourning doves echoing my grief and I wonder: do you think of me too? I peer over walls into a secret garden filled with exotic blooms that I will never hold in my hands, but how lovely the fragrance—
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MARGUERITE
When I think of you I remember my childhood—those empty hours and vast evenings of my youth in my little room at Merisel. I recall the ticking of the clock down the hall and the desperate call of mourning doves in the garden, shadowed by pine trees. The endless summer days were mine, and the nights belonged to me—nights filled with a music no one else heard, in smoky parlors that had long since disappeared, over champagne and cigarettes anglaises. I recall the whispering and the laughter, beneath crumbling mansard roofs and the strain of musette down forgotten streets. You were there, Marguerite—in miles of organdie and tulle, on distant nights of poetry read by candlelight, echoing in my head.
Now in a wiser age you linger in the sad hues of late afternoon. In the melancholy church yards, against the tolling of bells you wait for me—stretched across the spires, flickering in the glow of streetlamps. I see you at dawn, down the hallways speckled with light; in café crèmes on balconies against a brightening sky. Your voice is my city: the fountains and the hôtels, nights full of chasselas and evenings spiced with rum. I hear the depth of the sea as it crashes over the rocky shores of Primel Tregastel; in your voice is the agony of sleepless nights along the locks, cold and infinite beneath the stars.
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OPIUM AND AMBERGRIS
I think of you tonight like every night, drifting through the distant spires of my city, sleeping in the loblolly pines. Your memory fills me with music from evenings past; the warmth of salons thick beneath opium and ambergris; the richness of mahogany and leather. You are loved and familiar as parlors languishing in hues of burgundy and sapphire, sinking beneath whispers and champagne and melodies of wax. Suddenly I am in a garden filled with the scent of acacia wood, starlit and ancient, beckoning me as the flags of ships returning from exotic shores. Your hands; your lips; the curve of your face are incandescent as sunlight and mesmerizing as topaz…
I am drawn down endless corridors through open windows, out into the hydrangeas of summers at Merisel, over café crèmes on balconies at dawn. You are clear afternoons in parks filled with laughter and silent moments adrift in an ocean of steeples. I feel you in every brick of every warehouse in the haunts of my youth, bright as copper skimming fountains on infinite afternoons, mingling with tobacco and the scent of magnolias. You echo off gables, fusing with strains of musette tripping down alleyways on nights of Baudelaire and Prévert read by candlelight…
Tonight you are the sound of church bells in cloisters purple beneath the shroud of late afternoon. You linger behind garden walls, longing and desperate as the call of mourning doves; you are mysterious like the winters of my youth, dark as the sea beyond Saint-Malo. You fill me with a thousand memories of sky and sand, opal and garnet, cedar and cassia…
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MARIE-OCÉANE
She came on sails of sapphire, with violet fields of starlight through her hair; through midnight harbors where mômes would drift like silk, over songs carried from ancient shores. Marianne carried the immensity of the sea, brooding and pensive like the depth of winter; and draped over birch trees like a heavy cloak she was stark as the opal skies of January.
Marianne broke like dawn on the horizon. Poured out like frankincense or strange elixirs from pots of alabaster she filled the heavens with delight, drifting through the stillness like music. She carried with her the hope of dawn, luring sailors home from distant lands with her light. In the darkness I caught her in my hands, and lying on the sand I watched her twinkle like starlight between my fingers. And huddled in the blackness we bathed in the warmth of her eerie glow.
Marianne waits for me on the shore—and midnight calls her Marie-Océane.
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NIGHTSHADE
Mireille, Mireille—ma miette! You hide in the artemisia in the cool of the afternoon, little pearl of summer. Are you amethyst?—Or beryl?—Or peridot?—I pour you out like oil onto my hands and inhale your secret perfume. I found you resting beneath the willows, your chestnut hair curled in the breeze like threads of silk. And in the verdant lush of June you filled me with hues of summer emeralds like the warmth of the sun.
Imbued with a secret poison you've weakened me with a strange fever, and in my delirium I feel you tremble in my brain. Now I lie awake in the waves of a sleepless night, drowning beneath waves of restlessness. Down strange corridors upon a fainting couch I hear your laughter echo in my ears, and in my veins I feel you swim as under the spell of wine.
Let me bathe in the immensity of your warmth, tangled beneath your fingers in the dark. You are hung over the city at dusk like coral-colored velvet, and I am left to wander the streets in the haunting glow of your beauty.
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MOONLIGHT
I remember those soirées through the mist of the claret, as the salon sank beneath the whispers of the crowd. When the silver-speckled night was strung up over the city, and melodies of Pervenche crashed upon the shore. Called through open windows I drifted through moonlight, swimming past cupolas adrift in the sea; out among a thousand gables and the bell of the Chapel, I drowned in a thousand memories.
And the parlor was bathed in the orange of lamp glow, as they moved through the din, borne on ships of rêverie. Among the music and the murmurs in topaz and amber, we sailed together through decadent harbors of wood. And tangled on distant strains of Christiné and Scotto, I sat alone in contemplation, skimming pools of green.
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