The Peony's Hidden Message

"Immortality begins in the eye" of Gaspar Orozco's peony. His budding, petaling, and wilting flower is also a skull, a city, and a world where fire, water, and air interact with petal-like closeness.

This series of prose poems is an oblique history of world cultures in troubled times and a plea for a return to beauty. The opening page tells readers, "The first page of the book of the peony is lost." Sentences later, the first page is "still to be written." The double paradox of reading a page that is neither the lost first page nor yet written requests each reader to enter the mystery and the impossibility of seeing deeply into any flower's lifespan and, in particular, the peony. It serves as a showy, evanescent, and liminal metaphor for itself as well as for the transitory nature of empires, thoughts, and dreams.

The bilingual edition has facing short Spanish to English prose poems, one to each page, with about 41 pieces in two sections. Each page offers its own layers of symbols. Gaspar Orozco's bio as a career diplomat born in Chihuahua, Mexico in 1971 and based in San Diego is balanced by his credits as a member of a 1990s punk rock band and co-director of a 2011 documentary film Subterraneans: Mexican Nortena Music in New York.

His bio in part prepares readers for the international scope of Book of the Peony. Part 1, verse 16 is a poetic interpretation of Cai Guo Qiang's art from fire, which starts with blank paper, an idea, and chemicals activated like fireworks. Orozco likens the artist's process to how ideas burst forth from the mind and leave a message "in the silent scorch mark that's been left behind."

Part 2 opens with an undated quote from Vasko Popa:

The red peony's flamedries the raven's blood-drenched wings.

Its significance is not fully clear upon first or second reading. Vasko Popa lived from 1922-1991 in Belgrade and wrote this in the Serbian language in the early 1950s. According to Christopher Merrill's Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars—based upon research and first hand experience in the region, this quote refers to Popa's series of poems about Blackbird's Field—its white peonies were stained red by the blood of fallen Serbian fighters in the battle for Kosovo. Merrill, quoting Popa's translator Charles Simic and critic Svetozar Koljević, points out that the Serbs still honor their own defeat here in the Turkish-Ottoman wars of 1389. So Blackbird's Field and red peonies symbolize 500 years of Turkish occupation at the time Popa wrote the poem. It seems likely, but is impossible for me to know, that Orozco is aware that Milosevic used Popa's poems to stir Serbians into the Serbo-Croatian war of ethnic cleansing (1991-94) that started with a speech in Blackbird's Field in 1989. If so, the Orozco poem that follows may refer to holocausts past, present, and future. Another possibility is that Orozco has changed the quote slightly, making the peony a healing force.

This slender quote—originally about ongoing blood feuds—sheds light on the peony's further symbolisms in the Orozco prose poem that opens part 2:

Red enveloped in a reddish light. Facing me, only half the peony. The other half hidden in the impenetrable obsidian of this nocturnal return. Thus, half-open, the divided flower invited me to detach the flame from its flame. And I didn't do it, mortally wounded by the kind of weariness that had separated me from that apparition. I asked myself, of course, what fire would burn in the invisible part of the flower. What letter of fate would have been inscribed in that zone forbidden me. What part of me would have been boiled away in that aroma, in that unreachable dampness? Like being at the gates of a city impenetrable in the beauty of its semidarkness, but...