Ode to a Glass of Red Wine

You lurk,

more glittering than glass,

a silent afterthought

to the bite of your bitter sweetness.

You burn

like raw tobacco, unlit.

Your birth

Whether loamy, graveled,

or sandstone soiled

is collection of the flotsam and jetsam

liquefied through subterranean vein-work

of distant vineyards

into the pulpy void of the heart.

So tell me, do I speak an ode

to the wine, or its glass?

There is a sense of terrain to you, so much

that I could lick a stone,

like when I was a kid lost in

bramble and dark fruited earth.

You are fed alive

to the bloodstream, and so

I call to you in praise,

mineralized in tartaric acid.

And although I come

to you in thirst, you are

drying, puckered, parching sour.

Delicious,

you upbraid

the lips and tongue with

a lush and coating tannic kiss. You drip

as blood of earth, and lick

the vanillic afterscent resulting from

contact with oaken barrel.

Fruit and cedar-wood breathes

earthly bitter tears, directly onto the glass.

Now you’ve soured

into darkness and vermilion equal to gemstones,

which is why

you have often been compared to blood.

But blood is quite another color,

having none of your translucency

and glint of purpled ruby: the quickly moving

light that liquid echoes.

You are

a brainwash all

a-flush with fermented warmth. This is true

Whether you are born

for festivities or for fighting—

quests or quarrels—

a heated ether-driven inebriation serves

the spinning brain, in dancing, in talking,

and telling intimate truths.

You serve the tearing, biting, broken rage that

deals blows, curses, or laughs.

What are you?

You seem only to be a beverage,

an ordinary thing and everyday gulp,

but you are more than that:

You are a fierce and joyous god,

Bacchus, the Loosener,

terribly free and blissfully brutal,

as seasonally dismembered as your vine.

You are called Twice-Born,

now to die again in the stomach.

You are the vine, and the bunch to press,

to trample;

You are called Twice-Born,

As serially consumed as befits your illusory ordinariness,

IN VINO VERITAS: In Wine is Truth.

This is your Wisdom/

This is your Farce.