22 Aban 1404
Quatrain 6 of 75
“And David's Lips are lock't; but in divine
High piping Pelevi, with "Wine! Wine! Wine!
Red Wine!"—the Nightingale cries to the Rose
That yellow Cheek of hers to'incarnadine.”
Reflection · Autumn 1404
The rose's cheek in autumn is yellow before Khayyam's nightingale even gets to it — the color has already drained, the petals browning at the edges, the fragrance turning from fresh to something heavier and sweeter, the last fragrance of a thing departing. The nightingale cries Wine! Red Wine! more desperately now, because the yellow cheek is a symptom, and desire knows what it means.
David's locked lips are felt more keenly in autumn, when silence accumulates. The singers go quiet. The nightingales leave. But Khayyam catches the moment before departure — the last cry in the old tongue, the final attempt to incarnadine what autumn is already claiming. There is a Persian quality to this kind of beauty — beauty most vivid at the edge of loss, the rose most itself when it is almost finished.