The Rose

This rose folds
White as cream
As thighs
With the edge of pink
And air
Of a night
filled room
in the throes
of candlelight.
Under that rose,
of sheets petaled around
us, we form a flowering
rise and fall of reaching for
the tip of life
within, where we begin
wrapped in the smell of skin
the taste of sound.


This rose, -still soft,
drying on my desk wafts
chest and breast, fingertips, as I
bend to breathe its borders
red now -- blood
calling to flesh and blat

This rose, now,
paper cloud,
on my wall that
I would tear,
open to air,
to teeth and tongue,
the treble
And base
of the body song
we've sung.

The notes I write on yellow pads,
are not those I would sing,
from the parchment petals
Of that rose.

MaryAnn Bennett Rosberg