The Rockrose Moon (A Serial Fiction)

Part VI
So what can I say about Michel?

He eats his rice with plain yogurt on top with a soupspoon when he needs comfort food. He speaks seven languages, often a mix of them in one sentence. He buys his shirts in Italy when he is having a manic phase. He loves to sit in a café on some ancient piazza with his shopping bags and drink coffee and pretend he is Italian. Some days he believes it himself.

It is all his fault I write poetry. He sent me, online, just after we met a most beautiful poem he said was translated from the French. It was very romantic of course and I just assumed it was some famous poem and he had forgotten the attribution in haste in wooing me.

It was three years later when he told me he had added some stanzas, and read them to me that I was flabbergasted (such a lovely old fashioned word) to find that he had written it himself. In French, of course.

The first poem I wrote was about his father, a painter and film director I’ve never met him, as he lives in Düsseldorf now. The poem is about blue roses, a repeating image in Michel’s early conversations with me.

The poem just jumped out of my pencil as if it were a lightning strike, fully realized it was written without any conscious attention or intention. The good ones still arrive like that, unbidden. Oh baby.

Last time I saw him he had acquired a copy of “the Red Violin” and we watched it spooned in bed. He knows how I feel about Joshua Bell.

So depressed I have often wondered how my man muse managed to hold it together to take me out those first few times. He is masculine enough to admit he has the soul of a woman. I love him for that but mostly I love him as the messenger of the gods that delivered in that mix of affection and despair, my passion, and imparted it body to body as one often does an affliction.

One from which, painful as it often is, I wish never to recover.