(Week Five) Improvisation #2 of Form

Alicia Stallings' "Thyme"

I have some of it still,
We gathered on the hill,
In an empty glass, the bunch of wild thyme,

Faded now, and dried,
But in which yet abide
Some purple, a smell of summer in its prime,

When we stopped the car
Bought honey in a jar
At a roadside stand. It makes me think about

The theft of bloom, the sting,
A swiftness on the wing,
Things that sweetness cannot be without.


My Improv':

In a stained glass vase I keep Kashmir
saffron. Stigma of the fall
flowering crocus, translates into golden
color and fragrant flavor. At least
that's what the package says.

You came home like Odysseus, late
and clad in a filthy tunic. The results
of hard labor, sure. Charybdis' sweet song
on your neck. You'd stolen off
to the bar in town, drinking again.

The vase once caged a purple cluster
of Chaste petals on stems. You brought
the bundle home one morning, swaddled
as a newborn. But they died after two weeks.
I drown them with neglect and your absence.

Unlike Odysseus, you cower when, on late
nights, you arrive home, find me asleep
in another room. The tonic on your tongue,
the gin sweating itself out from your pores, is not
shame or guilt. Regret, maybe. Yet I call it

revelry. I keep that vase, full of spices,
on the nightstand, next to the pillow where
your head should lay. Though unworn, the frame
of our bed, made from metal, has started to age. If I
were Penelope, I would tangle strands of living olive tree
around my body and let you sleep the sleep of the dead.