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IN THE ICEBOUND HOTHOUSE / William Goyen IT IS TRUE that I have not been able to utter more than a madman's sound since my eyes beheld the sight. I've lost speech. And so they have asked me to write. Since you are a poet, write, they told me. Little do they know what they might get. Little, even, do I. So I'm writing this in the Detention House where they're holding me until I can give word. Little do they know what I might give. Little, even, do I. A "suspicious witness" they name me. I am, certainly, a witness—or was. But was there no "suspicious witness" for me? To help me explain? Maybe the dead naked girl was my witness. Had she watched from the high window of the Biology Lab? As I loitered near the icebound hothouse? As I knocked on the ice-armored door? As I peered through the ice-ribboned windows; as I waved to the sullen Nurseryman inside? No use wasting time on that, her lips are forever sealed, cold, kissless and silent. But the dead naked girl certainly was my key to the hothouse; it was she who, at last, gave me entrance, opened the icebound door barred to me heretofore. Through her death. Before my eyes, at the sound of crashing glass, sprang open the door shattering ice over me. I got in! Oh I got into the hothouse all right. Her sacrifice! The diving girl's sacrifice! I notice as I write how my mind throws rapid thoughts. Not like my mind. Which' usually operates in languor; at slow bubble; and darkening and thickening, like a custard at simmer. Symptom of my bad head. But would not working among green things make for a certain bliss? Harmony, peacefulness? What had disturbed the Nurseryman that he was drunken among his growing things? A crocked Nurseryman in the hothouse! Drunk among his plants, drunk in the greenhouse. Drunk in the shooting galaxy of Fuchias, knocking his head into the comet blossoms. His drunken breath scalding the Maidenhair Fern; alcohol fumes over the Babybreath. Pissed among the tuberous Begonias. Seedsman in a warm nursery of sprouts and tendrils, so close to the making of leaf and bud, to the workings of bulb and seed, wouldn't you think the nursing man might be tranquil? What ate at you, green man, that you drowned your sorrows? What blighted your joy, nurse, that you sought relief in the deadening of it? What is the canker worm that ate at your roots? If you, among healing flowers and leaf, got a kind of madness, what about us lost in the bloomless? If the green be mad, then what of the dry? What does it mean that the garden is greening and the gardener withering? For if the gardener walk dumb, be two sheets in the wind, what of us, who speak and are sober and have no garden? "In a world of grief and pain, flowers bloom, even so," to quote an old say204 · The Missouri Review ing. Even so. Even so, I was haunted by the drunken Nurseryman. Plotzed, smashed, a bag on. The Phlox grows so straight and is so festered with blossoms: what of the afflicted hand that shakes as it tends, and scatters the blossoms? How can a quivering hand tie a leaning stem? Without a clear head— hungover in the greenhouse—can bulbs be sorted? In a plague of Whitebug was both nurse and patient afflicted? Then who nurses the nurse? There for most of the month of January, everything was frozen cracking silver. We'd had a "silver freeze": rain all night, a sudden drop in temperature, everything brittle, silvery, ice-encased, breakable trees cracking, streets and sidewalks paved with ice, houses like iced cakes. Fierce, burning world, untraversible, a harsh world of thorns, daggers, blades. Passing every frozen morning in this silver winter, the elegant greenhouse, tropical oasis on that desert campus, in the month of January when everything was frozen silver, I saw him weaving inside the ice-gripped glass. Under a frozen sky I moved like a cripple over the frozen land. The greenhouse...

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