FLOWERS

WHEN THERE ARE FLOWERS IN a room my eyes are drawn to them. I feel their presence in a way that I do not feel chairs, sofas, coffee tables, curtains. Their fascination for me must be connected to the fact that they are alive, not dead. The attraction is prereflective—it rises up in my body before any articulated thought. Before I can name the flowers (if I can), before I can tell myself that I am attracted to the blooms, the pleasurable sensation has arrived. The color red is especially exciting. It is hard to turn away from red flowers—to not look at amaryllis at full stretch, their broad pale-green stalks erect or leaning slightly behind the glass of a vase. When snow is falling outside, my happiness is augmented—red against the white seen through a window. And in summer, I cannot resist gazing for two, three, four minutes at peonies that have spread open into fat, heavy clusters of petals with their stamens of yellow dust.

Dying flowers don’t have this power over me. In my garden, I pick off wasted blossoms, snip rosehips, pluck withered, browning leaves. I neaten up the dead, but I hover over the living blooms. I watch a bee sit on the beaded orange heart of an open daisy. Sometimes I adjust a flower’s head toward the light, careful not to bruise its petals. And I find my encounters with these quickening but senseless plants so absorbing that I do not narrate them. This is odd because I am continually putting words to living, always forming sentences that accompany me as I greet a person, sit at a dinner party, stroll on the street, but there is no inner voice that follows me in the garden. My head goes silent.

When I was a child, I lived in a house outside a small town in Minnesota. Behind the house was a steep bank that led down to a creek. In spring, after the snows, the water rose and flooded the flat bottom ground. It was on the slope above the creek that I found the first bloodroot growing in the soil. I remember the cold moisture seeping through my pants as I sat down to examine the flowers. When there were plenty of them, I gave myself permission to pick a bouquet for my mother. Their tiny white heads drooped as if in sorrow, but their true enchantment was located at their roots, in the rhizomes that contained a reddish sap that bled onto my hands. As I plucked them, I thought of wounds and of grief, and was overtaken by a satisfying melancholy. My infantile animism had a long life, but in my conscious memory, these personifications were never complete. I lived in a state of only partial belief, not true belief. Because it could bleed, the early bloodroot was more human than the bluebell that came later. I remember how much I liked to open my palms once I was home and examine the red stains the flowers had left on my skin and that I felt a kind of awe, an awe, I suppose, about the living and the dead and the injured.

2011