One could not live without delicacy, but when
I think of love I think of the big, clumsy-looking
hands of my grandmother, each knuckle a knob,
stiff from the time it took for hard grasping,
with only my childhood’s last moment for the soft touch.
And I think of love this August when I look
at the zinnias on my coffee table. Housebound
by a month-long heat wave, sick simply of summer,
nursed by the cooler’s monotone of comfort,
I brought myself flowers, a sequence of multicolors.
How tough they are, how bent on holding their flagrant
freshness, how stubbornly in their last days instead
of fading they summon an even deeper hue
as if they intended to dry to everlasting,
and how suddenly, heavily, they hang their heads at the end.
A “high prole” flower, says Fussell’s book on American
class, the aristocrat wouldn’t touch them, says Cooper
on class in England. So unguardedly, unthriftily
do they open up and show themselves that subtlety,
rarity, nuance are almost put to shame.
Utter clarity of color, as if amidst all that
mystery inside and outside one’s own skin
this at least were something unmistakable,
multiplicity of both color and form, as if
in certain parts of our personal economy
abundance were precious—these are their two main virtues.
In any careless combination they delight.
Pure peach-cheek beside the red of a boiled beet
by the perky scarlet of a cardinal by flamingo pink
by sunsink orange by yellow from a hundred buttercups
by bleached linen white. Any random armful
of the world, one comes to feel, would fit together.
They try on petal shapes in public, from prim scallops
to coleslaw shreds of a peony heart, to the tousle
of a football chrysanthemum, to the guilelessness
of a gap-toothed daisy, and back to a welter
of stiff, curved dahlia-like quills. They all reach out.
It has been a strange month, a month of zinnias.
As any new focus of feeling makes for the mind’s
refreshment (one of love’s multitudinous uses),
so does a rested mind manage to modify
the innate blatancy of the heart. I have studied these blooms
who publish the fact that nothing is tentative
about love, have applauded their willingness to take
love’s ultimate risk of being misapprehended.
But there are other months in the year, other levels
of inwardness, other ways of loving. In the shade
in my garden, leaf-sheltering lilies of the valley,
for instance, will keep in tiny, exquisite bells
their secret clapper. And up from my bulbs will come
welcome Dutch irises whose transcendent blue,
bruisable petals curve sweetly over their center.
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