Go, Lovely Rose

Originally written on August 15, 2007. Re-posted for its timely relevance...



"I wonder", he thought, "does she ever think about me? About what could have been?" He had tried for weeks to clear his mind of her image, her memory, but the more he tried to distract himself, the more he thought about her. Simultaneously, he wanted to forget she ever existed and to run his fingers through her hair and down her cheek. He thought of the time that they said goodbye, sharing a long look into each other's eyes, and cursed himself for not saying what he truly felt. He almost wished that she would scream at him to go away and leave her alone. It would be easier to forget if he knew she hated him. But here he was in a self-imposed limbo, not knowing at all what she felt or thought about him.



He knew that he should have walked away when he first met her, that he should have never have spoken to her. But how could he have done that? She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life. Her
beauty was the timeless, classic beauty that would have been admired all through the ages. He thought of a poem he had learned years before, and thought that it was a woman as beautiful as her that Edmund Waller wrote about. The words rushed through his mind, as beautiful as it was when he first read it; as beautiful as her.

Go, lovely Rose—
Tell her that wastes her time and me,
That now she knows,
When I resemble her to thee,
How sweet and fair she seems to be.

Tell her that's young,
And shuns to have her graces spied,
That hadst thou sprung
In deserts where no men abide,
Thou must have uncommended died.

Small is the worth
Of beauty from the light retired:
Bid her come forth,
Suffer herself to be desired,
And not blush so to be admired.

Then die—that she
The common fate of all things rare
May read in thee;
How small a part of time they share
That are so wondrous sweet and fair!

He closed his eyes and pictured her in his mind; her hair, her eyes, her smile, her lips. He remembered staring at her lips one day, wanting only to kiss her softly. Then stark reality snapped him back to awareness, and he thought of a lyric that fit his life more appropriately; "He simply turns away and dons a bitter frown; his world is crumbling, his ship is weighted down." He wished that he had the courage to speak those words to her, to tell her what he felt, how much he wanted her.

After putting a disc in the player and shutting off the lights he closed his eyes to the words; "How ya supposed to learn to be forgotten? Darkness just pretends to know."