Porcelain Roses

I packed away the remnants of our life together—

all except your porcelain roses.

You gave them to me in the dead of winter

because, you said, they'd never die.

And we'd agreed there was no sadder sight,

nor sadder scent,

than that of withered flowers.

But porcelain roses never breathe.

They never grow.

They hold no velvet touch—

only brittle, painted petals

and tarnished silver stems.

So tonight, I'll put away the roses.

---

What the Tide Left

It's the summer of '78. Astoria Park is Saturday night busy — boom boxes blaring, car engines racing. Voices rise along the riverfront, loud and raucous. The playground up on the grassy hill is full of shadows on swings and leaning against fences. The smell of weed and tiny clouds of smoke drift out of car windows. Traffic on the bridge and the glow of Manhattan light the dark waters where an occasional barge, like some phantom ship from a B-movie, passes through, mostly unnoticed.

Inside the blue Nova, the song Roundabout, his favorite, blares, but our voices are almost whispers between kissing and the nervous pushing of boundaries against what might happen in the back seat beneath the shadows of the Hell Gate Bridge.

It is exciting and scary and I am in love with a boy — a high school senior from a vocational school with a mischievous mouth and blue eyes to die for and a car. A boy who gave me a birthday present today: porcelain roses on silver stems. He'd held my face after I opened them. "They'll never die!" Every sixteen-year-old girl's dream.

That's how I like to remember it.

I mean, he did give me the roses.

Which I threw out the following winter after one of our many nasty breakups — over the first of many now nameless girls, though I'm sure they each inhabited a lot of ink in my diaries.

And I did write the poem when I was sixteen. After I tossed the roses in the garbage.

It wasn't until I graduated from high school two years later, turned eighteen, and met the eye doctor, Paul — an older man who worked at the same optical store as me — that I really put them away. He bought me something more practical, usable that summer: contact lenses. He took me to clubs and restaurants and music venues in Greenwich Village. And he drove my parents crazy!

The eye doctor was gone by fall, but not the excitement and exuberance of those months. And Mike returned — with a great idea — "Let's get married."

I could not trade in my contacts for a ring.

So Mike got married.

Just not to me.