Red Tulips, Then Asphodel
Was I ever truly happy, like some girl in a red tank top
eating sunlight in Spring?
Hard to say. If flowers are symbols of emotions,
it’s still hard to say.
What belongs, what goes, and which way. Did I once
feel like a tulip
bending gracefully toward its own root, its own death,
the lower my head
the more beautiful? Or was I ever showy like a peony
for one wild week,
sexed fully pink without blushing. What are emotions
anyway? Flowers die
not knowing. And yet our feelings lead us down that one
path we only ever take,
deceptively edged with bloom after bloom after bloom.
Brenda Shaughnessy
🌷
Special Problems In Vocabulary
There is no single particular noun for the way a friendship, stretched over time, grows thin, then one day snaps with a popping sound. No verb for accidentally breaking a thing while trying to get it open — a marriage, for example. No idiomatic phrase for losing a book in the middle of reading it, and therefore never learning the end. There is no expression — in English, at least — for avoiding the sight of your own body in the mirror, for disliking the touch of the afternoon sun, for walking into the long flatland that stretches out before you after your adventures are done. No adjective for gradually speaking less, and less, because you have stopped being able to say the one thing that would break your life loose from its grip. Certainly no name that one could imagine for the aspen tree outside, its spade-shaped leaves spinning on their stems, working themselves into a pale-green, vegetable blur. No word for waking up one morning and looking around, because the mysterious spirit which drives all things seems to have returned, and is on your side again.
Tony Hoagland🙏“Thank you for insulting me.
You helped me see how much I was worth.
Thank you for overlooking my humanity.
In that moment I gained power.
To be forgotten by the wider world
and the righteous religious
and the weaponized soldiers
is not the worst thing.
It gives you time to discover yourself.”
❤️
