Persephone in Spring

[enlivenedaltruist]

Why should this flower delay so long
To show its tremulous plumes?
Now is the time of plaintive robin-song,
When flowers are in their tombs.

Through the slow summer, when the sun
Called to each frond and whorl
That all he could for flowers was being done,
Why did it not uncurl?

It must have felt that fervid call
Although it took no heed,
Waking but now, when leaves like corpses fall,
And saps all retrocede.

Too late its beauty, lonely thing,
The season's shine is spent,
Nothing remains for it but shivering
In tempests turbulent.

Had it a reason for delay,
Dreaming in witlessness
That for a bloom so delicately gay
Winter would stay its stress?

- I talk as if the thing were born
With sense to work its mind;
Yet it is but one mask of many worn
By the Great Face behind.


--The Last Chrysanthemum, by Thomas Hardy


__________________________________________


Lily Maymont is no austere old maid. She wasn’t even a maid when she was Liliane DuPont, and the years that loom between Liliane and Lily, while certainly capable of being called many different things, in no way fit the label ‘chaste’. Lily has always been a creature of passion, in all applications of the word.

She has loved deeply, and admittedly broadly. She has had lovers from all walks of life; rich gentlemen, who courted her like the most elusive of debutantes, rough and gruff thugs who smelt like the oil of their precious bikes and cars and tasted of cheap tobacco and whisky, cynical authors who scorned the conventions fed to them by society and burned deliciously like black coffee on a cold Manhattan morning, kind, hardworking young fellows with smiles like sugar cane and hearts of gold beneath their tans, and regal older men with a quiet appreciation for a pretty face and a sharp mind. She has experienced love in nearly every form there is, and has never regretted a single liaison.

One of her favorites to reminisce about occurred somewhere around twenty years back, give or take. She had been backpacking through the enchanting beauty that was the French countryside when she came across a young artist. He had charmed her entirely. It was a romance, in the most traditional sense of the word; despite never taking the plunge towards la petite mort, Lily can say with certainty that no other suitor had or has ever managed to sweep her off her feet so completely. Despite the age difference, Lily had never felt that he was anything less than her equal. He was certainly not the fabled ‘One That Got Away’ or any such fantasy; they had parted on completely amicable terms, albeit perhaps a bit more belated than any of her other dalliances had been.

She had, as many artists’ lovers had before her, been his muse. The final piece she had acted as the model for had been, as he had admitted, his masterpiece. With a rueful smile and a truly Gallic shrug, he had admitted to it being the perfect end to tie off his career as a painter before he moved onto the mediums of clay and stone, which had begun calling to him. It was entitled Perséphone au Printemps, Persephone in Spring, and when he had finally shown he the finished product Lily had nearly forgotten to breathe.

“Lovely,” she had commented, eyes tracing over the shadows and curves of her own nude form, supine against a lush green lawn and curled among flowers. She let out a soft hum and leaned forward, inspecting a strange, pale green bloom near her cheek that actually took her a moment to identify. “A chrysanthemum?” she mused. “I guess I can see it, since it’s mainly used as a funerary flower over here.” There was a pomegranate tree blooming in the background, after all; ‘a taste of things to come,’ as he had joked. “But I think it blurred with the grass a bit.”

“No,” he corrected with a smile. “That’s the color I wanted. If you look past just the European beliefs and mythology, chrysanthemums are representative of so much more! Optimism, joy, love, perfection…The death symbolism is definitely a plus,” he admitted, running a paint-spattered hand through messy ginger locks. “But that green? That light, delicate green is clear, white purity touched by the potential for a new beginning. A new life to unfurl, petal by petal, day by day, a life filled with optimism and death and joy and love.” He was so beautiful when he spoke of his art, full of passion and brilliance. Sometimes she wondered what became of him, after they went their separate ways.

She thinks back on him with a smile, just before the crash and the explosion of a meteor colliding with a thankfully unoccupied section of her property. When she makes her way out to investigate the damage on her own, despite the protests of her staff, the vision of Persephone is still dancing through her mind. Perhaps, when she slides down the slide of the crater and finds a little girl with copper hair in two tiny braids sucking contentedly on her own fist, that’s why it’s so easy for her to pick out the slant of her artist’s eyes and the gentle curve of his cheekbones beneath cherubically rosy layers of baby fat. When those eyes flutter open and reveal that striking, unforgettable pale green, something that has been waiting quietly in Lily’s chest for years blooms.

“Hello, Chrysanthemum,” she whispers gently, picking up her new beginning. “I think I’ve been waiting for you for a very long time.”

Comments

[enlivenedaltruist]

kjzdfgnjfkghfhgfdg what but this is...old....

alsoI just so happen to have a musebox handy...