San Gabriel Valley Poetry Quarterly

Brian Thorpe

ROTATIONS IN REFLECTION  

At times, like Proust in his cork-lined room, I too will savor the sesame cake of memory.And when I do, a water wall of things recalled amasses, cajoles and amuses with an amniotic solace.

With bold acrylic strokes, I'l let the camel haired brush of embellishment have it's way and color more vividly a seaside arcade of long ago pleasures, jovial and ferris wheeled, undone and undaunted. Or banish the anguished moments that tear like shrapnel at otherwise unblemished hours. 

When reverie is like some Celtic imp or genii of sand covered legend, I haughtily command its' many talents and order it to make the orb of giddy images spin for ecstatic hours. 

At other times I'll have it wax soulful and like a guest at Plato's symposium cause me to ponder with poignancy the lessons harvested from childhood sojourns and revere the wisdom gleaned, as I would behind a confessional curtain or kneeling for votives and vespers. 

Often too, in youthful digressions, I've let it plunge into vats of Merlot and Chardonnay and, so elated, let it personify into one more son of Miniver Cheevy hoisting a glass to glorified specters of fabled pageantry and reimagined history. 

At last, when in carnal reservoirs I allow it to evoke the still stirring images of furtive gropes behind school gymnasiums, of cautious anxious hands let loose under shirts and sweaters or diving eagerly beneath blue jeaned waistlines. 

But when the creature defies, is no longer benign and with some vengeful purpose becomes a changeling  with needle- like claws releasing recollections that taunt like clock hands on a sleepless night, what then? 

The womb suffocates, the seaside arcade quells beneath a carapace of indigo. It's emblem  becomes the child's pail and shovel discarded at the end of an August day, the ferris wheel car transmutes into the chipped and desolate porch swing on a January morning. 

The confessional becomes a prison cell, the vespers turn to curses and the votive candles are suddenly the pitiless naked bulbs in a cheap furnished room. 

The idyllic son of Cheevy ceases to endear and so transforms into a vile, belligerent lush pounding his fist on the bar at last call and demanding one more seven and seven 

And the tremulous searches behind the gymnasium? They too dissolve into images of nights spent alone while others danced, of calls cut short, terse and wounding and letters ignored or unanswered. 

It is then the comforting walls of my room fall flat around me. I am abruptly naked and unguarded in a field of snow and the sesame cake turns rancid, stale, rife with mold and its crumbs become morsels for mice.