Craig Constantine has been a day laborer, bread baker, furniture mover, and TV producer. Now a poet, his hardest, worst-paid, best job. Five of his poems currently appear in magazines in the US, UK, and Australia.
Swan Song of the Saucer Magnolia
1.
Love at last sight,
Laureate of the first.
The eyes of experience,
Elegiacally taking their leave.
And the eyes of innocence,
Waking up to the erotic.
The saucer magnolia tenders its blooms.
The neighborhood swoons.
Dogwalkers stop in their tracks
Even cars slow, and drivers gawk,
At this roseate effusion,
This riot of pink flesh.
“Your tree . . .” they stammer.
At first sight, they cannot summon the words
That at farewell, flower.
2.
These goblets of pure and prurient complexion,
The pastels you dream in the womb.
The pink curtain of the cervix as it raises
On all the panic and passion play.
The velveteen robe of blood
Exchanged for the porcelain white of linen
That is the frail badge for all that’s chaste.
For the wimple of the nun’s habit is the inner petal,
As the dress of the seductress is the other face.
The pink mists and purple bruises of the fistfights
When I defended my brother or myself
From the bloodbath of bullies.
The glint of lip gloss on the pageboy girl.
The bubblegum breath of the mouth as it parts
And leans in for the first time.
The alabaster of tanline, and the blush of the aureole.
Each bloom a chromosphere of coming-of-age.
The corsages of all the girls at the proms I never went to.
The tassels of the graduations I never made.
The blood moons I saw on all the lost highways.
The auroras like soundless thunderbolts
Of boundless shades of violet, that night sleeping rough.
The boutonnieres of all the ring bearers and best men.
The tulle and organza of generations of brides,
The casket sprays of our beloved, and ourselves.
3.
We are no strangers to immoderate color.
Bougainvillea blazes on every other corner
Like all the Spanish royalty of The Prado.
But this is nude Olympia in the Paris Salon.
Perverse to those first eyes, and now to ours.
The level gaze, the courtesan’s choker, the cupped hand.
The bared white skin, the shrouded black.
4.
Come March, the flesh turns papery,
Like a corsage pressed into a yearbook.
The top-heavy goblets droop,
And disrobe. Shrugging off their petals
Like all the tulle of the brides of June.
Long odds, that I will see it bloom again.
My dead brothers and sister daily flood
My neural and vascular inboxes
With reminders that I am past their time, and mine.
Each forbidden glass foretells the last.
Death has kissed me more times than I care to name.
Soon enough, the lurid consummation.
5.
But let these words be a letter in a secret box,
Passed in fumbling hands from desk to desk.
For what chaste and indecent epiphanies await,
Should I see the pink passion of the saucer magnolia once more,
With the new eyes of another year?
© Craig Constantine