Red Bicyclette by John C. Mannone

They say the best wines come from France

and perhaps the ladies, too, but where soil,

water, sun and air, and even microbes, temper

grapes for grandeur, something is always lost

if taken out its natural environment. California

is no substitute for the Mediterranean Rhone.

The first time I kissed you—by the trellis—

I knew your supple sweetness would be

hard to preserve overseas. But I celebrate

the thought of you today on this bicycle tour

through the lush vineyards and in a small café

by the ocean. Or so I thought I was.

I park my red bicycle in a melancholy breeze.

A red cloth sprawls on the round table

with a half-empty bottle of wine—a dry syrah—

its green vitreous unable to hide the purple

so plainly seen in the tulip shape glass.

Light-spokes in its crystal base, focused

by the bar-lit stem, shimmer up

the glass neck to the wet pulsing liquid

darkened by air. Pulmonary.

They say, let the wine breathe, soften,

yet even air is tinged with tannins. Acid

puckering the back of my mouth. Tongue

curls. Little foxes had spoiled the vine.

Lights hang from ceiling as stars

bulbing their own tints of blue and red,

but are merely puffed-up polyethylene.

From half-shade shadows, I see

their reflections in the wine, glints

swaying, liquid ebbing jarred walls

from soft throbs of my fingers.

And the plastic colored rays

in my Red Bicyclette are still breathing,

are still life, but now a shade closer

to heart stain.

John C. Mannone has work in Adanna Literary Journal, Anacua Literary Arts Journal, and Number One, and in Artemis, Poetry South, Human/Kind Journal, Red Coyote, Blue Fifth Review, New England Journal of Medicine, Baltimore Review, and others. He won a Jean Ritchie Fellowship in Appalachian literature (2017) and served as the celebrity judge for the National Federation of State Poetry Societies (2018). He’s a retired professor of physics living between Knoxville and Chattanooga, TN. http://jcmannone.wordpress.com