No one really dies in the myths. No world is lost in the stories. Everything is lost in the retelling, in being wondered at. We grow up and grow old in our land of grass and blood moons, births and goneness. We live our myth in the recurrence, pretending we will return another day. Like the morning coming every morning. The truth is we come back as a choir. Otherwise Eurydice would be forever in the dark. Our singing brings her back. Our dying keeps her alive.
What things are steadfast? Not the birds. Not the bride and groom who hurry in their brevity to reach one another. The stars do not blow away as we do. The heavenly things ignite and freeze. But not as my hair falls before you. Fragile and momentary, we continue. Fearing madness in all things huge and their requiring. Managing as thin light on water. Managing only greetings and farewells. We love a little, as the mice huddle, as the goat leans against my hand. As the lovers quickening, riding time. Making safety in the moment. This touching home goes far. This fishing in the air.
A lane of Yellow led the eye Unto a Purple Wood Whose soft inhabitants to be Surpasses solitude If Bird the silence contradict Or flower presume to show In that low summer of the West Impossible to know -
Through the young and awkward hours my lady perfectly moving, through the new world scarce astir my fragile lady wandering in whose perishable poise is the mystery of Spring (with her beauty more than snow dexterous and fugitive my very frail lady drifting distinctly, moving like a myth in the uncertain morning, with April feet like sudden flowers
‘… where pleasure and beauty and hours with no quantifiable practical result fit into the life of someone, […], who also cared about justice and truth and human rights and how to change the world.”
“Even as ornament, flowers represent life itself, as fertility, mortality, transience, extravagance, and as such they enter our art, rites, and language.” – Rebecca Solnit, Orwell’s Roses.
In Poland, the land takes over everything, unrelenting in its mission to regenerate after the war. Fields overrun sidewalks, train stations, street corners. Purple flowers spill from the open windows of houses. Queen Anne’s lace reigns supreme in parking lots. Even the dead in cemeteries are affected: no neatly trimmed grass here but waves upon waves of wild flowers. Blue lupine, saffron, black-eyed Susan, chicory. The dead love this wildness growing above their bones. “Tak, tak,” they whisper in the hush of the wind that scatters the soft gossamer of dandelions into the waiting air. “Yes, yes, take over this place that was once lost. Cover it in so much color even the clouds, who’ve seen everything, won’t know where death lived for so long.”
And who can argue with the dead? Not their thin ghosts or unborn progeny. Not their exile who returns after the war, stands bewildered at their graves, hip-deep in blue-eyed grass, trying to decipher names that already belong to the earth.
after William Carlos Williams’s “Queen-Anne’s-Lace”
Remote purple lays claim to stem, beside routine stripes of green and brown. Dark as a patch of shade in the marsh across the path that the neighborhood kids and I, were forbidden to pass. It is that hue that overtakes, the marsh that sucks in boots and offers up skunk cabbage and cattails. Nests here and overhead. Who named this plant— also called bog onion, brown dragon, Indian turnip, wake robin, Arisaema triphyllum— and who told me I cannot name. But his purple—all shadow, all remote and not-remote, all question marks, craving. Yes? This herbaceous perennial, growing from corm vertical and swollen as it is underground. Even in late summer, it is not nothing, William (or Jack), turning from purple to red before his scattering.
You are a land I can’t stand leaving and can’t not. My party ship is pulling out. We all have hats. I try to toot some notes you’ll understand but this was not our instrument or plan.
