Je dis: une fleur! et, hors de l’oubli oú ma voix relègue aucun contour, en tant que quelque chose d’autre que les calices sus, musicalement se lève, idée même et suave, l’absente de tous bouquets.
[I say: a flower! And, out of the oblivion where my voice casts every contour, insofar as it is something other than the known bloom, there arises, musically, the very idea in its mellowness; in other words, what is absent from every bouquet.]
—Stéphane Mallarmé, “Crise de Vers,” in Divagations [Tr. Barbara Johnson]
I
For flowers, I have cared little:
an obliteration,
condensed grace notes
lading anthologic leaves,
images grand—loves, lives . . .
I aloofly ignore their
semaphores of shared
human days, hope and
renewal, sighs
of cheery spring.
And though flowers remain
in hell
also—where their frightening incandescent
azure petals(’ [in]determinacy)
assume(s a) dilapidated sanctity:
say, the sublime delphinium—
I might even thoughtlessly dismiss
opuntia, that prickly pear
(or saguaro
on a languishing tide),
as my eyes fail their conditioning,
ocularcentrism squandered
on beige-blank institutional
walls unwittingly covered with
this, that, but never blue blossoms
of ipomoea nor clematis,
never gentian nor brunnea,
which I perceive only in poems
(or on the internet),
desperately.
Yet I am no Deckard
wandering inorganic wastes.
Otsego County screams green
today and yesterday,
my backyard full of peaches
and false goldenstar,
shoots of sugar maple and never-ending grass,
as if winter could be
forgotten.
II
Silver-filigreed columns
of May rain arrive
in the Catskills’ foothills
unlike cruel Pittsburgh
or parched Tucson—
in torrents and
yawning relief—
but unremarked and refreshing,
a prelude or intermission
for a minor demigod
to assert its presence and,
briefly acknowledged, depart
happy, its opalescent eyes glinting
behind gossamer tresses
with prosaic satisfaction.
Blooming in the aqueous wake
are oxeye daisies and wild carrot,
black cherry and garlic mustard,
but I barely register
their avenant sprigs,
their understated variety
pulsing through earthy
membranes beside my tread
while I pace the back porch
consoling the future.
They say that absent
in nature’s bouquet
are my thoughts’ contours,
or at least, their sonic equivalence,
an arisen music,
a gloomy pronunciation,
perhaps regarding the beauty
of a day’s history, but most
certainly a familiar statement:
an annihilation, a replacement,
allegorical barriers removed,
meaningful relations exhausted,
experience dynamized,
an eternal moment. . . .
III
In my floral liberation—
a refulgent catalysis,
decades of miniature
crashing waves—
referents have nevertheless
stretched their striving names
across my words’ scarred garden
to wound its unhealable
statuary: it was
a dark, serious book.
The insistence of
early adulthood in this
horrible century
on everything diverging
from a belief in some
flower
makes me thankful
for supposed usefulness
but despair that the light
has already entered our lives.
The imagination might
need a replenishing
bloom, a mature pause
on new electric thresholds
of the inescapable real,
a projective assembly
feeling no allegiance
to previous formulations
nor disinclination to revise.
But flowers?
Jack-in-the-pulpit,
Philadelphia fleabane,
European lily of the valley,
and common columbine . . .
might their negated presence
stir the soil of new words?
Perhaps, though I anticipate
walking home later, intent upon
other things.