Dry flowers chafe in a January vase

while I long for bouquets of early summer

wantonly riotous

from the Mennonite Market stall

where prim, unadorned girls

with soft assuaging hands

sort a beauty they must interiorize,

only their bare fingers know

the seductive sweetness.

Here in the white and grey nunnery of winter

a memory of awakening scandalizes

with the covert yearning for perfume and promise

softening the beds of earth

stretching long days of kindling light

seeming as a scene from an old cathedral painting

in an impressionist gallery

where barefoot suppliants tease toes

and drink the alcohol of flowers.

Katherine L. Gordon @ 2011