My Daughter Draws the Parts of a Flower

Knowing nothing of sex and all its troubles, she outlined the sexual parts in heavy black and labeled them carefully: pistil - plump bulb baster, its pregnant, uteran bulge narrowing to a phallic style; the whimsical stamens waving their curious p's and q's; then filled in the outlines with a flagrant, grade-school yellow, adding two pale sepals and some vague, pink petal afterthoughts. I saved it. Who knows why? The child who painted this has entered her own fallopian mysteries and holds her sessions far from home. The drawing, shoved from drawer to drawer, keeps rising, as if this huge, botanical cartoon, so cheerful and explicit, might yet teach me something of articulate desire - although the yellow tempera is now grainy as pollen and the paper itself, that rough school stock, has gone soft as suede or the powdery skin of the old woman I am becoming.