Name Of The Rose
© Surazeus
2026 06 07

The bald-head man with glasses and mustache
adjusts tweed jacket and laces work boots,
then sweeps huge pile of old discarded books,
heaped on rain-slick sidewalk, against brick wall
next to glass door of some abandoned bank,
lamenting how knowledge of the past gets lost.

"I cannot decide what to name the Rose,"
he muses while staring with rain-blurred eyes
at tattered covers of paperback novels
that depict bitter women in torn dresses
and angry men with guns and loosened ties,
"since the girl from the village is my mother."

When he was young student in art history
forty years ago at the university,
he traveled to Italy for the summer
where he climbed the steep Stairway of the Dead
to find lost book that Aristotle wrote
hidden in gloomy Abbey of Saint Michael.

One cover shows corpulent businessman,
in blue suit and red tie, wearing a blond wing,
whose face resembles the ravenous pig,
so he remembers how Odysseus
was wounded by sharp horn of a wild boar
while hunting on slopes of Mount Porcorianus.

Greedy tyrants who clutch with manic fear
at transient illusions of fiscal power,
elusive as Hound of the Baskervilles,
since Hugo was cursed for kidnapping women,
attempt to burn the sweet innocent girl
because she laughs at their frail vanity.

Residing in lush Garden of Delight,
the Girl from the Village with golden hair,
tends delicate rosebud of her thorned bush
while her train of nymphs wearing flower wreaths,
named Chastity, Danger, Reason, and Shame,
play with elegant grace in stone-rimmed pool.

The Lover wearing clothes of Everyman
gazes entranced in Fountain of Narcissus
where reflection of Rosebud sparks true love
to blossom with desire from aching heart,
as if sharp arrow pierces him with hope,
so his voice echoes with Name of the Rose.

Adjusting tattered books on metal shelf,
the balding hippie with glasses and boots
sells them to passing strangers for one penny,
then visits grave of his wife, Rose Marie,
who died from cancer twenty years ago,
and cries how beauty of this world is lost.

surazeus.blogspot.com/2026/06/…

Orpheus gives rose to Ophelia and asks her to marry him as they stand together in the Abbey of Saint Michael on the Mountain of Pigs near Turin.

#Poetry #Poem #Pastoral #Necropastoral #MetaModernism #Transrealism #NewSublimity #NewRomanticism #AmericanDream #Cinemism #Existentialism #Surrealism #NegativeCapability #NewGnosticism #MetaRealism #NewTranscendentalism #Astarism