Cheap
Red Wine
After
Galway Kinnell’s ‘Oatmeal’
Most nights
I drink cheap red wine.
I drink it
alone.
I drink
from a Baccarat crystal wine glass
of which I
have only one and that is why I must drink alone.
Popular
wisdom tells me it is not good
to drink
alone.
Especially
cheap red wine.
The dank
and cloying aroma is such that a feeling of sorrow
can too
easily twist into despair.
That is why
I sometimes think up an imaginary companion
to drink
with. To ward off the despair.
Last night,
for instance, I drank with Charles Baudelaire.
He drank
from the bottle
owing to
the single Baccarat wine glass.
Charles (he
begged me to be familiar) said he was grateful
for the
invitation.
He hadn’t
been getting out as much as he used to.
I
apologised for not thinking
to invite
him sooner and asked after Jeanne Duval,
if he had
seen much of her lately.
He sighed.
Dans l’amour il y a toujours un qui soufre
pendant que
l’autre s’ennui. In love,
there is
always one who suffers while the other gets bored.
I nodded
and refilled my glass.
Charles
read to me from Fleurs du Mal,
as the
evening breeze blew through the open window,
and I
confessed to him my anthophobia,
how
sometimes the scent of flowers can fill me with unshakable dread.
He nodded
gravely.
Such a
feeling, he said, inspired him to write
the lines:
arrangements of flowers encoffined in glass exhale their ultimate breath;
and, I
prefer the autumnal fruits over the banal blooms of Spring.
He
shuddered and finished off the bottle.
Deep into
the night Charles read to me,
and as I
fell asleep in his arms I had the idea
that
communing with the dead needn’t be a mystical activity.
It may
require no more than a glass
or two of
cheap red wine
and
listening, intently, to the bodily meanings
of ghostly words.
Bronwyn Lea,
Austrália
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