The Seeds

The mouth closes around a word full of O.Hope: a plea, a sigh, a pieceof enclosed land, a small bounded valley. Also an inlet, a small bay, a havenin the lake I steer my boat into            (dropping my good shoes and then my feet into the biting water) because the waterreminds me of a dance floor. O,                I'm thirty-four again, in summer,                giddied by grease smoke and soft serve

from the fast food shacks, my blown-back hairmimicking the bankside cattailseach time I do a double takeat the drive-in marquee. Each timeI ride a car around the lake

it's an odyssey.        Did I hope            like Odysseus or like Penelope?        I no longer remember the steps

the stranger and I dancedat the party by the water, expectingwhat we desired. Sweat darkened my dove-graydress, nasturtium petals toppledthrough the salad leaves, waveletsfrom a storm far offshoremet the black breakwater and surged            upward. Like the particular hop            in the stomach when I see pews            with sky blue cushions stacked            in the back of a pickup truck on the highway, or

when we pushed our beds togetherin the damp rented room. The lake had already rolled in our sheets, mildewmarbled the walls with fungal mist.

            I hoped the storm would stay offshore.            I hoped a storm would come in.

It's said there's a wooden chest at the foot of the bedthat a girl should pack with a heart-shapedstone, a nightgown, and a clumpof forget-me-nots she finds by the stream.        Not me. I packed        a jar of lake waterand my grandmother's two sets of silverwhose tarnishes clouded the spoonsdarker, reminding me to be diligent,for no woman            has swallowed a storm. Along        with Faith and Love, Hopeis personified as one of the threeheavenly female graces.

Emily Dickinson: "'Hope' is a thing with feathers."Gertrude Stein: "I hope, I hope and I hope. I hope that I hope and I hope."Dorothy Wordsworth: "I lingered out of doors in hope of hearing my Brothers tread."

Is hope the province of women?

            "As I hope to show": a means        of arguing gentlyin a scholarly essay. The blind peer reviewerchastised me for using it, correctly assumingmy gender. The water rings on my wooden desk                marked pools                of thought that I daredto reign.    Delete, delete. I erased hopein order to argue, I presumed,like a man, offering an analysis not as one of manyprovisional approaches to a textbut rather as the only routeto the palace.        "I hope all will be well," Ophelia says, but we knowshe is doomed when she starts talkingabout fennel, columbines, violets, and rue.             Not a hope in hell, hope against hope, hope for the best.

Ophelia reminds me            of the mountain laurelthe botanical illustrator placed in a bathtub full of waterto paint branch and bloom undistortedby gravity, lifelike evenas they died. I've heard            of a horticulturalist who entered a field            thinking that whatever he neededhe would find, a method I find irresistibleuntil I suspect it is only availableto men. The difference between hope    and entitlement is the difference            between imagining how much hay            the meadow will bear                and assuming your winter ponies                won't starve.

Gertrude Stein again: "Hope in gates, hope in spoons, hope in doors, hope in tables, no hope in daintiness and determination. Hope in dates."

Historical hope: on the Internetyou can find a poster of the man who becamepresident. Red and blue, the word in all capslike a vine twisting up the stakeof history. A long

time ago. MeanwhileI circumnavigated a minor lake.In a car. I was thirty-four                when I put down the Ziploc of candy                I'd been surviving on and admitted                that I was a woman. I stopped hopingto be a flower girl in a weddingwearing a daisy crown and scattering petalsfrom a demolished rose.            Some...