Rosy Promenade

Rosy Promenade

Mark Coleman

   The covers to my chin, I fell into an embryonic sleep. Twirling down alleyways encased in marble-veined buttressed glass. The shops on either side displaying their polished and dusted trinkets.

  The bell jars beneath which stand rigid, obeisant praying mantises reflecting the sun’s rays. Chaperoning those swimming pool dances on the hotel room’s ceiling. Lying there in remembrance of planetarium school days.

  The delft seahorses lined on wicker rocking chairs as fragile as their seafaring brethren. The diaphanous dorsal fin fine as a square of blotting paper. The curlicue tail beckoning in foreplay come hither. The head like a miniature wolf’s from bespangled snout to starfish eye.

   Hobby horses with a button missing in their heads give up the neigh. The mauve thread fractured out of knit. Stuck in black plastic potholders padded out with Styrofoam peanuts. A little yellower than the ones in the cardboard boxes your toddler builds castles with. Dry rot on a pogo stick. 

  The ruby lipped Russian Dolls rotund with quadruplets. The carefully painted babushkas from which the central parted, flaxen hair arches as the bristling cat on the scratching post flashes its adamite embers. The logs in the hearth prodded by insolent pokers flame as the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

  A dirge howled by the hound at the foot of its master. The corncob pipe scorches as the match hits the tobacco. A long inhale. A tubercular cough soothed with grappa. The dog snuggles in closer to itself and moans. Its ears lay back on its head.

  I move past a cathedral covered in gargoyles. They sit on their haunches and grin out at empty space. Small scale Passions run through cornices. A shamrock cross accentuates the cleavage of a passerby. Sext and pious chatter.

  The candy store on my right parades its saccharine wares. Peppermint barber poles rooming with licorice sticks. Bottle-nosed strands of taffy on wax paper beside multicolored nuggets. Lemon, Chocolate, Grape, Melon, Vanilla peacock in their cases. Gumballs spiral down into the palms of girls in sundresses.

  Cokes wind up cambered straws to the pursed lips of foppish men’s dates. Eyelashes bat flirtatiously. Milkshakes in stainless steel elevator up to the flipper adorned blender. Spattering the countertop. Coquettish laughter over French fries swimming in ponds of ketchup.

  Packards outside the movie theater. The marquee missing a vowel here and a consonant there. Inside they talk fast, garbled nonsense and speechify the nuclear family. A semi-salacious poster promises licentious adventure. Excited couples rush to the ticket booth. The attendant gets a paper cut, and sucks his thumb.

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  I find a dying rose in the street, and proceed to pull off its petals. An erotic poet would find in it a different life than me. For me it has a human face. My fingers stain red. I think of lipstick and a passion drenched Malevitch square.

  The soft tangibility of blue velvet in the mind taking on voluptuous curves. The warm mound of breast from which Empedocles will never escape. The hips thrown and the buttocks tendered.

   A woman approaches in a tight fitting dress, her black satin underwear peaks out at me like a playful child around a corner. Her budding anemone eyes seek out a tenebrous horizon. An enchanting white mist clings to the orbs as it does in those blind. There’s a sort of grope in her spyglass glance.

  The ships are too far to sea to properly make out. If they were bottled, she could peruse them at her leisure. The schooner with its spruce hull and paper sails.  The Plasticene sea raging behind it. Fragments of pelagic tissue pasted to the sky.

  A truck unloading orange crates bars her way. They are piled before a farmer’s market on the sidewalk. A few rogue fruit find their ways into the greedy paws of street urchins.

  Further along the gulls cry over the boardwalk. The crabs march up and down. Their eyestalks frond swaying. Their pincers snapping open and shut. Rostrums in philosophical mull.

  I wipe my hands on the back of my pants, leaving a menstrual-esque stain. My blue-collar movements are reflected in a rainbowed gasoline puddle. I attempt a whistle but it dies somewhere between my tongue and lips. I feel like a mechanic, and I wish that I had grease on my jeans.

  A twist in my boxers makes me change my position. A crick in my neck has me gazing up at a starless sky. I move about the hidden constellations to positions I would have preferred as a child. Standing on the mantelpiece with a spur in each hand.

  Broken snow globe wintering the carpet. Tiny splinters from a calf’s femur running off in streamlets. The idyllic scene disturbed. The shepherdess displaced from her sheepfold. The ceramic Zupfe rolling end over end to the clawed foot of the couch whose cushions remember every unfaithful liaison.

  The rose in the vase has gone un-watered and has begun to wither. In some cursory manner, she has made it to the ocean. Rushing down the esplanade, crushing lavender and centaury under foot as though they were nothing but frost flowers on the lake back home.

  Down past the cracking indigo beach huts. The startled tourists beneath their umbrellas showered by the sand her heels kick up. They don’t attempt to shake out their blankets. Their silver trunks and pitch pupils shoot blistering glares at her. The sun at its meridian wishes it were the moon.

   The waves crash against rocks above which towers a sprawling, uninhabited estate said to be haunted by a suicide. An exclamation gathers at the back of your throat. Beachcomers, shocked out of their work, stare at her figure as it disappears into the white-crested waves. The tin in their hands drops back. The metal detectors nix the treasure. Only the noose has solved the pirate’s riddle.

  Someone dives in after her, coming up with nothing but large bunches of sea grapes in his hands. Women in straw hats and one-pieces begin to gather just close enough that their toes are submerged in the water. Men with cheap sunglasses about their necks on Dayglo elastic cords and sunscreen on their noses mumble reassurances through graying mustaches to their wives.

   The wives shoo them away like the swarms of flies that overtook a section of the beach where a whale decided he’d give the landlubber life a go. The woman may or not wash up. If she does, the crabs are sure to find her first. Picking over whatever the fish choose to leave them. Her features will be ruined. A small child on his first vacation raises a seashell to his ear, and listens to the sea spread out before him.