If you're not familiar with 3 Quarks Daily, get familiar. Among many other fascinating things, they post a poem every day. This is today's. It recalls, for me, so many memories of my own self and of so many women I know and love. It makes me miss tasting wine in the Napa sunshine with Maria, Gretchen, Amanda, Laura, Abby, and everyone else I've ever made that pilgrimage with on a Saturday afternoon. It makes me miss Jocelyn and six dollar magnums of the grossest wine, but in the best company, at the house party du jour in Thousand Oaks. It makes me miss glass upon glass of two buck Chuck in the kitchen on Channing street, or in the fading sunlight of the Dels courtyard, or on the grass up on campus. It makes miss the carefree warmth of what a lingering glass of wine, outside, represents.
If You Could See Her After Drinking Wine . . .
—to Micheál agus Michelle
If you could see her after drinking wine,
Wine from Chile of the berry-red kind
Prancing ahead of me in the middle of the night
Through the business district with her face alight
Having left the pub late and a little tight.
Ah, if you could see her after drinking wine.
Wine called Hoch from Germany’s Rhine
Her hands like birds fluttering in flight
In a sugawn café when the day is high
Her voice louder than the crowd’s by just a mite.
Oh, if you could see her after drinking wine.
.
If you could see her after drinking wine,
Beaujolais Nouveau, strawberries and cream
At a garden party under autumn’s gleam
Her bike by the gate lost in a dream
Of the road home as the sun goes to sleep.
Ah, if you could see her after drinking wine.
.
If you could see her after drinking wine.
Wine from California’s grape-fields fresh and new
Hopping through the Stack-of-Barley a bit askew
In her oh so new blue suede shoes.
If you could see her, as I see her, after drinking wine . . .
If you could see her after drinking wine.
- Colm Breathnach
