The Lavender Garden.

The heady scent of lavender filled the sparkling evening air,

perfuming and saturating her green silk dress,

her tousled, long red hair.

She wandered through the garden, then ran through rows of

purple flowers

to escape the hordes of wedding guests, the joyful party-goers.

For Myshka was sad.

Unaware of her distress, the late-shift bees continued their work,

gently letting her pass unhurt.

She sat down on the welcoming, sun-baked earth

not heeding the dusty stones and dirt.

She looked up.

Ancient oaks stood starkly silhouetted against a blue and peachy sky;

a sunset-softened church remained forbidden and unused.

Myshka looked within herself and wished

she could fly.

Back to him, to Yuri, her most secret and forbidden love.

She thought of him wistfully, longingly, knowing he was far away,

tucked up in the sheets of his domesticity,

in his southern cottage on the moonlit bay

where they had laughed and loved.

She remembered....

He’d worn his blue-eyed anguish like a just and righteous penance,

absorbing every wound she’d hurled into his tortured mind.

He’d watched her slowly dance:

he’d realised he had been blind.

Blind to her secrets, blind to his thoughts, failing to see the truth,

 then, unleashing  a thousand sorrows, he had opened Pandora’s box.

He saw imagined scenes of mockery

 instead  of the twisted, tangled history.

 He may have been mislead.

 Surely mislead, by the hurricane of wild thoughts that swept through

his heart.

Myshka’s spirit fractured. She floundered.

 Unsure where to start.

He’d sat so still, so quiet, surrounded by the

soft, red glow of desire....

....submitted to her spell, and dragged himself from the mire

of his desolation.

He turned his thoughts to images of sweet, pure passion,

and swept aside the tide of bitter indecision

which threatened this promised union

of bodies and souls.

They had been quite alone, willingly drowning in her white-hot fire.

The woman felt the twilight wrap itself around her

melancholic  mind,

and she gazed up at the stars,  hoping to find

the answer in the heavens.

She tasted the salty tang of tears as they flowed down

her cool, tanned face,

imagining herself in that other place,

where he suffered in silence.

The same kindly moon looked down upon her paramour

but failed to nurse him to the shore

of dreamtime.

 Guilt-wrapped and feverish thoughts raced through his head,

so he rose,  rejecting the bed

of matrimonial comfort, and gazed at the sea.

The orderly garden of his life had become a wild and fierce wilderness,

where he did not wish to be.

He remembered her dance.

As if in a trance, he floated back in time, to Saratov,

the night that Myshka stole his heart

 and fired his soul, inspired his art

as no other had done.

Her silky, slow adagio, her dream-like glissade would stay

in his mind until his final day.

Carabosse indeed. Her spell was cast,

and Yuri was enveloped in a cloak of darkest

obsession.

He fought with fierce and furious

jealousy, yet insatiably curious

about the black and red and vicious web

within which he was trapped.
His rage surged and merged
with the vengeance he desired.

Another lover?

How could she love another?
He hated her, he loved her too.

Murderous thoughts of criminal acts and violent actions came and went, but killed
his ballet dancer, in his angry mind.
Her slender, white throat scarlet and slit, her life-blood spilled?

her treacherous heart shot and filled

with lead?

Her toxic love stilled

and silenced for ever?

To see her cold, quiet and exquisite corpse on a cold and quiet

marble slab?

His Myshka; his precious one, his wicked, wild and wanton

woman.

He hoped.....

Such a powerful connection could not be broken,

such vital words not left unspoken.

Thoughts of Myshka filled his life,

twisting and turning like a burning knife

and piercing his very soul.

Thoughts of Yuri encompassed her dreams

and rendered her sleepless , untold

hours of remorse, contrition spent weeping....

The dancer returned to her artist, like a moth to a flame,

and meekly accepted the blame

for his dark and dreadful despair.

The artist turned to his dancer, stroked her amber hair

and kissed her gently.

.