My Beatrice

My Beatrice

 

 

Crimson coats my fingertips, coursing down

to muddy everything I touch. I run a

 

hand across your bedroom wall and smear scarlet

over soft yellow in dull, predictable

 

rays. Just last summer you spent countless humid

afternoons bent over a tin of blond paint

 

in this very corner, windows pushed open,

your girls’ laughter and bicycle bells singing

 

somewhere down the street. With each turn of my wrist,

I undo a dozen of your careful strokes.

 

Thoughts of Dante bleed in through the window where

 

once you looked out and saw your wife on her knees

in the garden. “Every good teacher is

 

practically a Beatrice, drawing students

to the Way,” you used to say, but now the red

 

has caked up under my nails and flies off in

hard, faded flakes, flakes that bury your daughters’

 

echoes of summer and engulf cucumbers

in your wife’s garden and swarm your splattered bed-

 

room walls with no Way in sight. The shreds swallow

your honey oak furniture, drink an old vase

 

of baby’s breath, and one-by-one suffocate us both.

Author's Note

"There are false goods, and false gods; not everyone who thinks he is pursuing God, or has found God, really has done so."