Blousy Blooms

Gillian Sze has an impeccable eye for the cartographies of sensuality. Take this bit from "Mapping the Garden" in Peeling Rambutan . . .

A brothel of lilacs
Four bushes of heavy-chested women.
Their embraces can last two weeks.
They jostle you between them,
their perfume solid as solder.

In my first quick glance over these lines, I carried over the "i" of "solid" and found a "soldier" under the "solder". No wonder: apply a bit of heat and it fuses.

And so for day 2158
09.11.2012

Flower Sacrifice

My favourite passage in The Book of Tea by Okakura Kakuzo is an anecdote about the appreciation of flowers.

Flower stories are endless. We shall recount but one more. In the sixteenth-century the morning-glory was as yet a rare plant with us. Rikiu had an entire garden planted with it, which he cultivated with assiduous care. The fame of his convolvuli reached the ear of the Taiko, and he expressed a desire to see them, in consequence of which Rikiu invited him to a morning tea at his house. On the appointed day the Taiko walked through the garden, but nowhere could he see any vestige of the convulvus. The ground had been leveled and strewn with fine pebbles and sand. With sullen anger the despot entered the tea-room, but a sight waited him there which completely restored his humour. On the tokonoma, in a rare bronze of Sung workmanship, lay a single morning-glory — the queen of the whole garden!

I have fondly traded in paraphrases of this excellent story. However, it is only upon copying it out here that I realized that the generic "flower" of my tellings is actually species-specific. It adds a note of poignancy to realize that the morning-glory does not flourish as a cut flower. As Okakura continues: "In such instances we see the full significance of the Flower Sacrifice."

And so for day 1886
11.02.2012

Clusters of a Single Species

I have begun reading the work of American poet Philip Levine. This little bit from "Winter Words" collected in A Walk with Tom Jefferson is delightful in its exactitude and its animation:

Birthday tulips, twelve hothouse flowers
of royal purple on long stilt-like legs
that sag beside the frosted window.

I wonder what he might have thought about the season for the brilliant incandescence of amaryllis ... we know what he does with paperwhites, the above lines continue:

Paper white narcissus uncoiled from bulbs
that had only polished stones to push
their green shoots through. You can grow up here.

I like to think that the here is both in the poem and the referent to a place imagined.

And so for day 1760
08.10.2011

Bouquet

Seemingly intimate with the ways of gardeners, Earle Birney in a poem about visiting for the first time Al Purdy's Ameliasburg (collected in Rag and Boneshop) supplies a horticultural image in touch with the growing process:

horsecrap-fattened peonies

And Mark Doty brought a singular poppy gathered from School of the Arts and pressed between the pages of Fire to Fire.

Pink fist.	Iron frill.
Essential frippery.	Fierce embroidery.
Core decor.	Severe extravagance.
Lip of otherness.	Evidence.

And a spray from Amy Lowell: "The evening primrose, comrade of the stars."

And so for day 1024
02.10.2009