Dahlia

The Pond By The Linn

It was the pale yellow wing of luck – pellucid and radiant – that enveloped me, carrying away my sulking mass to that gleaming pond by the linn (had it been, I wonder, Luck's marvelous twin wing that brought you too to that arbour in the garden?)

You were already there when I arrived, apricating, half-nude, musing upon some infinity or another, and dismantling in your slender brown fingers the delicate body of a cherry blossom. You did not look to me as I approached – even when I'd greeted. Abashed at your having ignored me, I awkwardly sidled over to the bench nearer to the pond, whereas you rested upon a soft growth of bright-pink flowers some meters away, and there, on that bench, I sat silently, longing to be spoken to.

I asked you some rather silly question (what was it?) – but you only smiled to yourself; and the speeding vehicle of my curiosity was met with the indestructible wall of silence – and the explosion which ensued was a fatal one.

How madly I envied that pale and silky summer sun . . . for you yearned for its touch, allowed for the whole of your umber nude to be devoured by that fiery star – and so was the way in which I longed for you; to envelope and consume you, to possess you as fully as was possible, that was my maddest desire, but you expertly eluded me, and forever you remain to me nothing more than a throb in the web, a disturbance in the calm, a rare and spectacular butterfly that refuses to be captured.

Again I returned to my ruined mess of ash and metal (so was the remains of the aforesaid explosion) and attempted once more to engage in conversation – and you suddenly advised that I “shut up”; and suddenly my heart was whole; mirabile dictu, my love, you spoke at last.
“Perhaps, if you tell me your name,” I retorted. With a miserable sigh escaping your beautiful lungs, you moaned, “Dahlia.”
“Dahlia,” I repeated, tenderly savoring that sweet appellation on my tingling tongue.
The blood in my heart had burst upward into my brain, sending that peculiar organ into overdrive, and my imagination had completely enveloped me, every shadow and fleck of consciousness fantastically expelled.

Then, upon opening my eyes, you had vanished, like a snowflake in summer – beautiful and complex, reduced to vapour beneath a dazzling sunset.
I searched for you, through silky sun and miserable moon, I searched. I am not certain we will ever meet again, my darling Dahlia, but for as long as the blood throbs in my limbs, I will forever return to that garden.
(Au revoir, my love! And goodnight, wherever you are.)