A Sail to Great Island

Girl with Sunflower in Hand

20 Girl with Sunflower in Hand Holding a sunflower in a forties magazine, a blonde with a yellow scarf knotted around her neck like a scout’s neckerchief, an American girl, say twenty, the sunflower held before her like a hand mirror she turns away from. No flower needs to tell her she’s pretty. Her shining hair pinned back. Her brow so smooth light seems to be coming from it. Her sweater is a gray so soft it has pinks in it and the softest yellows. Her eyes are the gray-blue of water. American because she’s against no background except smoky gray, brown, and deep blue, perhaps the steam of a train. A girl from my mother’s era whose job it is to be the sun for others. But she can do this and stand alone. Her own roots. Her own stalk. Her sun somewhere above and to the left, burning through haze. Back then my mother liked to doodle pretty faces while she chatted on the phone, the profiles of perfect women, though now I know they were like this sunflower girl, the girl my mother never was, but is now, in death, where she hears music whenever she wishes, a pretty American girl who knows only hope that flows into her hair like gold. So odd that the soul is so bodiless it can flow like gray stuff which isn’t gray at all around a body like a sweater. On the face of the sunflower there are hundreds of seeds. In the life she has now each idea my mother has becomes human, the way I did years ago, my hair light gold. 21 A soul is what you can look like forever if you wish, the way sunflowers keep coming back in whole fields of perfect beings, perfect loving beings that bloom and rejoin the sun. 22 ...