Hibiscus
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That night while we swallowed the yellows, reds and browns of curries dished across shoals of rice, hibiscus like a pall of green velvet rustled, swayed between us and the street. Candles set in cradling shells rehearsed ambiance. Flat bread blossomed in your hands. A block away, forgetting the strict hibiscus, the ocean wheeled, a bolt unraveling, missing the salt still seasoning your skin left before sun went down in colors of spice, when everything was possible: daylight might unclench its petals again on the dark, whispering pall, and you might never rise from the tables of memory, or rise, but rise with me. [End Page 145]
Patricia Phillippy is a professor of English at Texas A&M University (College Station) where she teaches early modern literature and creative writing. Her poems have appeared in Salmagundi, Poetry Northwest, The Missouri Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, and other journals. She is also author of Painting Women: Cosmetics, Canvases, and Early Modern Culture, (Johns Hopkins University Press), Love’s Remedies: Recantation and Renaissance Lyric Poetry (Bucknell University Press), and Women, Death and Literature in Post-Reformation England (Cambridge University Press).
