The Lute’s Last Lie

Three rusted gates groaned open to his touch,
Their iron throats exhaling centuries’ dust.
There, veiled in mists that wept forgotten Dutch,
A labyrinth of lilies choked with lust
For light—white petals clutching at his knees
Like beggars’ hands or unremembered pleas.
The path unspooled, a serpentine deceit,
Each twisting step a riddle incomplete,
Till green-gold shadows birthed a liquid breeze…

And there She stood, the garden’s silent core—
No nymph nor spirit, but the bloom itself
Crowned in a halo of carnivorous lore,
Her stems the hue of madness on a shelf.
Black dahlias distilled from midnight’s breast
Sang lullabies no living throat confessed,
While willows, bent like aged scribes, inscribed
The dirt with secrets best left undescried.
He knelt. The air grew heavy with unrest.

“Play,” murmured the leaves in fevered tongues,
“And we shall feed you symphonies of dew.”
His fingers, raw from seasons’ whip and thongs,
Rebirthed the lute—six strings of ghostly hue
That wept not sound but colors yet unnamed.
Emerald trills became a jade-flamed hymn,
Each note a leaf upon Time’s withered tree,
Till roses swooned in scarlet ecstasy,
And thorns grew soft as lips that kissed his hymn.

Days? Years? The sun, a coin flipped by the grove,
Lay tarnished in Time’s purse of rotting silk.
He played the dusk until it birthed a stave,
Composed the dawn from petals’ milky ilk.
The garden pulsed, a heart beneath his palm,
Its rhythm syncopated, strange, and calm.
He named the flowers—Ophelia’s Last Sigh,
Lear’s Foolish Bloom, Cordelia’s Whitened Lie—
While roots drank deep his ballads’ honeyed balm.

But ah, what nectar hides the serpent’s tooth!
One eve, as violet winds began to croon,
He plucked a chord that snapped the veil of truth—
The lute screamed, bleeding amber monsoon.
The garden shivered, shedding borrowed skin:
Roses revealed ribs of long-dead men,
Tulips uncurled to monks’ parchment-thin faces,
And lilies hissed with venomous embraces
As all the air dissolved to poisoned gin.

“Fool!” laughed the dahlias, black as treason’s heart,
“You thought our song was gift and not a snare?
Each minstrel’s breath but feeds the prison’s art—
The garden lives because your soul hangs there.”
His fingers clawed the crumbling instrument,
Now fused to flesh in fungal testament.
The more he struggled, tighter vines conspired
To stitch his lips with threads of spider’s ire
And plant his eyes with seeds of discontent.

Moon after moon, the ghastly metamorphose—
His hair became a nest of creeping moss,
His tears the sap that down bark channels flows,
His once wild heart a petal-strewn albatross.
The lute, now grown into his chest’s hard cage,
Sang without him its everlasting rage,
While new-come wanderers, drawn by floral wiles,
Would pause to hear the garden’s borrowed smiles…
Then add their bones to the immortal page.

At last, when winter came (or did it ever?),
A child, pure of ear and empty-handed,
Stood where the third gate once tried to sever
Dream from dreamer. Through the mist she wandered,
Hearing not the lute’s corrupted cry
But wind through branches where dead minstrels lie.
She placed one acorn in the festered soil—
A single act to foil centuries’ toil—
And turned away as petals choked the sky.

Now sometimes, when the moon is veiled in grey,
A whisper slithers through the gardener’s thorn:
“Play.” But the soil remembers how to pray
For silence. And the child, now woman, sworn
To roads that lead away from siren groves,
Still hears in storms the ghost of desperate loves
That once believed a garden’s gilded tongue—
Yet walks, and lets no blossom coat her lung,
While far behind, a lute’s last lie still roves.