Coincidences

History has a way of looking at us from different directions.

 

come here and

observe how our neon-lit signifier of beauty, love, passion

the garden Rose

has naturally spread out some very prickly features

so well-shaped and sized and nicely aligned

by accident or design causing maximum harm

to anything approaching a fully hands-on inquiry.

 

next stand back a little but

be slightly more specific, and ask

from which side of the triangle of time

has

this contrast combination

of barbed flower

stemmed

did the pretty rose strike out its defences

specifically

to shield itself from the up-close spine-pinching intensity of our strongest predilections

or is there hidden beneath the petal-surface beauty of our passions

a darker side to our love

as significant favour for the rose was developed

not prior to the becoming of, and not in spite of

but precisely because of and in more or less daytime awareness of

its thorny double life?

 

then, finally, with both more open and more closed angles of the eyeline in mind

make demands to know what difference it would be, overall

if difference at all

historically

how would

the warning-sign rosiness that our garden Rose should carry now anyway

change

whether its sharpness arose because we can love things into extinction

or that our love a little more prior to itself than that conceals behind its flower-head first appearances an almost-rooted need for painful contradiction

that is

how would either of these truths save anything

or anyone

now

anyway

 

?