A moment, cast in amber, remains on the tongue like salt or
wood-smoke. Night is there also, a balmy, perfumed evening
tasting lavender and rosewater, the dark gloamy afterwards
a blue liquor of crushed violets and hyacinth-nectar and mint.
So I take from each piece of time, savour it, keep it in my mouth
as long as I can. I am a woman of fine elixirs.
Will you drink from my cup? You see I cannot guess at this point.
Perhaps you do not see the possibility. Can this be true? Or perhaps
you have no liking, no draw to the scent which rises from it. But
can this, either, be true? I hear in you the voice of pain and
see in you the stirrings of troubles, but each time I would link
them with my own dark mutterings I get some evidence hat I am not
the wound you worry.... should I want to be a wound?
My own liquor I guard zealously; it is glinting green shot
through with gold, and it is heady, and I cannot even take too
much of it myself. If I hold the cup out to you, it is not
without knowing just what searing horror as well as joy its
taste can bring. Do not think I have not drunk there.
Do not think I have not been intoxicated with it; it is
intoxicating, addicting, and you will crave it if you taste it
once. ...Shall I wonder that you do not stop to drink?
But the signals are confused. One moment I think you are
stopping; the next, with a word or two, you seem to warn me off:
I won't be pausing here, you say, pausing, so please don't be
confused and think that I will.
If it is my own clouds of yellow confusion which swirl around you,
obscuring your own decision, perhaps I should retract them?
Or would that cause you too much pain, remove the simple escape?
Or, worse for me, would you look at me with eyes like hazy glass
and simply say, I am sorry, my friend, but it is you who have
stopped beside me, and not the other way around, and I have no cup
of wine for you, not for you at all. You have misunderstood.
I am so afraid to have misunderstood that I keep my clouds swirling.
Not fair of me, perhaps. But swirl they will, for now, unless you
reach up to brush them away. Like cobwebs, you see, they'll
part for a word.
Are we simply both too frightened? I, who would laugh at this sort of fear? -- but perhaps, perhaps.