THE TWO ROSES, BY CRISTÓVÃO DE AGUIAR.

THE TWO ROSES

I am going to bury the two roses. On account of their already very weak scarlet shade, they had, a long time ago, breathed their last. All this rhymes with homesickness. Not too bad. I miss Her through them: she touched them and arranged them in a flower-pot standing on the desk. By an absolutely inadvertence of hers, she forgot her eyes upon them. As she could have dropped an earring or a ring in a haunted corner... I have just made them cosy in a paper coffin that will carry them to their final flowerbed. First of all, I was careful enough to collect and capture her eyes that remained there strayed as a flock of myriad of lights at night sown on the mountain ridge of São Jorge’s island... Thus, I still get a different breath and a more fortified fire. I do hope that their shroud should be ecological, so that their corollas may rot in peace and their essences may rest and rise to the ethereal flowerbeds where they came from. Later on, they will return with the desire of flourishing again in other or the same stalks, in other beings that may come to be roses, daisies, violets, pansies or anthuriums... For example, the orchids of our reunion in a December still very young, or the chrysanthemums of each end of Sunday afternoon that agonizes first in my eyes before reclining on the horizon. And all the other corollas, folded or single, that She spelled to me, petal by petal, in the gardens that we sow with the fertilizer of affection in the inside of the days! But I, with this incurable habit of wanting to perpetuate everything, was determined to extend them the vigour as I do with things, people, animals and even me ─ I must be a mix of all this, plus the mishap I represent, free and naked, before the mirror of myself... How sweet should it be to a certain sense still not invented to relish the fruit of being eternal! But at least within me, and while life does not deny me the bread of my breath, I believe that I have achieved it. So they stayed, like many other corollas that have been and will some day be, and She herself, past, present and future, conjugated in the unique voice of a single verb, perhaps mixed, regular or irregular, restrictive or non-restrictive, no matter, made flesh and blood, nerves, verses and semen... She only inherited the vivid virtues, transitive or intransitive and some of those other verbs that in the shroud of grammar find its natural bed of a serene and irremissible death. And She, crowned with daisies, shall prevail upon all of them!