The Thin Museum
Verse by William Dennis
Paintings by Michael Guinn
Gallery 5
Take everything, but grant that I may feel
The freshness of this crimson rose again. Akhmatova (The Last Rose) for Rekha |
Tea RoseAt your wedding to the fair-haired boy of Swedish-Italian extraction,
I stopped a moment breathing when you made the vow, to remember your first parents, lost in India’s dark. Your lavender bride’s-maids looked so young, happy and more beautiful even than they usually do, especially the slender Korean girl, who seems so much the whole-grain soul of her adoptive white-bread mother. I chanced on the other Korean girl outside, smoking, and she called, “You again!” the old joke from small-school days we have. Her Polish and Welsh parents try not to look amazed on the dance floor at the sultry brew of peafowl and bobcat posterity grafted on their stump. Two point five Filipinos graced the festive hall, your brother’s wife and daughter and the girl accompanied by your scarved and modest-footed Moslem, Malay friend. The rogue priest laid on to please the mother of the groom was Irish as potatoes, and so the minister, who blessed you for our side. The first had just returned from twenty-seven years of celibacy in Japan, to which his girlfriend, bent with calcium-loss, hopes that he will not return. The Baptist headed-up the table with that dear friend extracted of the Lutheran Germans. After years of shepherding and ecumenical liaison and missions abroad, he grew alarmed at corruption, conservatism and lack of retirement provisions and so became a gay but grumpy, incisive but forgiving social worker. The Jewish cousins came late, liked the beef and sat with your aunt’s Greek husband, who agreed with your brother-in-law’s mother, fresh arrived from India’s south, that the ceremony lacked doctrinal flash and ikonographic color, incense and aspergilli. But our friend and florist of French extraction made up in imported flowers what we lacked in paint. The groom’s Swedish side were all at pains to tell us how they welcome you within the circle of their kin. And one old couple wet an eye recalling how their son’s adopted baby hailed from some one or another lovely part of China. On every plate, beheaded, lay a rose, along the entre and the sauce. A tea rose, pale at base and blush at petal’s tip. Someone thought a leaf so green resembled that of tea. After so much steeping stocks of Bourbon, Moss, Damask and old Witchuriana, they are lovely, lack real fragrance and do not breed true. Each new specimen is fresh infusion of genes’ pekoe, re-juggled destinies for beauty’s ineradicable sake. Now hush the while I figure how to answer what this voter’s registration form before me asks, extracted from dried pulp of some survivor of a century long gone– “Race?” One wonders, who it is who wants to know and why? |
Off to the Newark Farmers' Market
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