GERANIUM LOVER You luxuriate in their musky scent, Rubbing thumb and first two fingers across a leaf you offer me your perfumed hand. The scarlet ones are best top-heavy with blowsy blooms. I grow other variations, delicate pink, shell-like peach, ivy-leaved and lemon-scented, but they're far too dainty genteel as Dresden ladies not like the harlots in my window, flouncy skirts seducing you their robust colour a buxom miracle of each year's cuttings shoved casually into an earthen pot. I stroke the silky petals and you kiss my proffered fingers burning scarlet, dangerous and ardent. -- Eithne CAVANAGH "Extended Wings 4, An Anthology of Poetry and Prose," Rathmines Writers, Swan Press/Dublin (1998).