Don Giovanni

It is eighty degrees in December. It is he, on one of his furloughs, bringing himself — and hell — up to date. My Don Juan, the better climber (as the mercury yo-yos), is in a newly roused state, the world circumcised away from an out-of-season bud leaving at the scrupulous rim, as it unfurls, a darker appliqué, like O-positive frozen solid at the sight of one’s resuscitated victim. This rosebush assiduously forks over its works where most grandifloras falter, thriving as far into the year as Capricorn. While named after a lover, it decorates its own altar and wields an extraordinary thorn: once I saw it catch a football in those semiquaver quasi-teeth; it is three-headed, like Cerberus, a hybrid drawing bloodlines from a root-ball on hands all that’s impure lies beneath. Hands can train it, barbarous as it is, on an arbor, and I might like to take its thick canes in harness, first pouring cement as a base (so it would know I meant business). Always poised to strike, they eventually undo their stays, baying out like a window of garnet, as at Chartres (torture chamber in its basement, or so I hear). I wonder how such a daemon rose got its start, what fairy tale explains its scent    ... And then I go out tonight and find him, swiping right on every pretty face in candlelight. It is almost Christmas. Stacks of square plates. (It’s an open plan.) Racks of bottles. The whites and blacks, clear glass, and stainless steel sieves denote compliance with standards. A wire basket of freckled pears is transparency; sterilized knives give full disclosure; and as regards the stemware, due diligence dares a slip, especially on chanteuses like these salting down from state-of-the-art speakers. (Or is it sugar?) Does the chorizo flambé not deter him? Gold as all hell, Valkyries stand tall with beer to the brim. Beakers in Siren form flush with Chianti, if not ambi- valence. Recalling the steel meshes belting Monterosso’s cliffs against the vox Dei of the sea, the myth refleshes: ordering, in the manner of heroes, an Andromeda on the rocks.