Heavenly Bodies

Cut Flowers

70 Cut Flowers Though the cut flowers wilt and the leaves wither, blanching in the vase for days, still they remind me of fields, the loveliness of fading part by part, so many changes, not sudden the cutting down, not brutal but a way of undoing. A fulfillment. Merciful, you could say, the cutting down and then the slow undoing, which returns forms to their beginning as they go, petal by petal, and leaf curling, how one shrivels and falls. A blossom that folds in on itself, remembering the bud. Complete in its beginning. As we say the flower is perfect, and I feel my soul in danger if I believe this because I am a flower, no, a field of imperfections and I may yet be cut down. Be mercifully undone. I’m sitting by the window and it is night; I smell the cut grass, and gasoline burning in cars that pass, and an insinuation of skunk—these frighten me because I cannot join them; they are not sorrow or undoing, they are life fulfilling itself, and I cannot settle my mind from this ungainly sadness. The window is open; the flowers lean away from it, wilting. A wish that I might be, not spared, 71 but taken back into this night garden, made part of something. This “I” a blossom that opens and falls, taken into a smell of cut grass, whatever comes to me, for me, across night, flown to this single window, lit from within by lamplight. A faintest fragrance of fields persists in these flowers, still lovely, wilting without sorrow, without knowing loss. And yet grief lives in the corners and under our hair and nails, private and untended against the world’s machine. It prevails, this grief, wrapped in moderation, and making small gestures toward what breaks the heart. But everything breaks the heart! It is here to break, only invented to be the fist of blood that bursts in the fire. Why I love the wilting flowers and the greens rotting in the yellowing water, not gently, not gently at all, but like some dead animal held in the hand. It is not merciful, I was wrong to say “merciful,” that was wish only. I have come to a place here at the kitchen table where nothing consoles me but these flowers detonating silently by the window. 72 Somewhere a meadow strewn with flowers untidy as stars, shimmers in light. A meadow uncut, never turned. I think I am talking about fear and I know fear is only ignorance of our true nature, mistaking the loss of ourselves for an end of being. The flowers stand up in the air beside the window. They were not slain, they were not rolled in heaps into ditches to lie upon one another; they stand up in the air beside the window, translated, waning as life wanes, in normal use, not in terror. I am sitting by the window. I am looking at the flowers. The night air is cool and I breathe it into every cell. Molecules of darkness become me. ...