Life of a Grape

From time to time,
Elegance evades me.
Minute by minute,
I wait
In the haze of the drink
To which I'm unaccustomed.
I remember ephemera
Metabolized into a solid state
And you come alive in remembrances of
Wine by the tablespoon
And anorexic sized crackers.
The fruit and salt
And corn mash distilled---
We belong to not another time
But another land altogether,
A slower turning earth of
Soft thunder, sweet rain, fragrant grass,
Feverish seed turned under a steady plow
Driven by a calloused, steady hand.
I was once told there was a love.
It was an untruth.
There are children.
There are dreams and lost days.
There are emptied glasses and counters filled with
Empty bottles without an assumed betrayal.
There are moments of solace
Punctuated by apnea
And lucidity piercing through clouds of everything
That seems to be real.
Clarity.
Love,
You are the healing sweetness
To the too-familiar taste that must be masked,
The grape that bears the freeze and rot
And melts into the mind-bending beauty
Of the centuries that follow,
That survives and defies finite expectation.
I shall sleep
Dreamless until sober daylight
And the ache of absence
That dwarfs the pain of the amputee.
Seven years or seven hundred
Absent of mirror and muse
In which I am submerged,
Seeing darkly,
Refusing to breathe and be.
Turn a phrase, a page,
A fallen leaf.
Crack the surface of
A new thing:
A hope,
A light,
Another morning.