Bouquet

                If you are in the garden, I will dress myself in leaves . . .
                                                 —Mary Oliver

Love • in • a • Mist

(Nigella damascena) Annual garden flower. Delicate blossoms, usually blue and white. “Self-sows” readily. Once established, can be difficult to remove. Common name derives from the nestling of flowering buds in a lacy involucre.

I have had too much wine. My cerebellum sings, and the swarm of bees rising up from my knees causes a faulty kinesthesia. Could you excuse me please? The room is humming like a hot hive. I touch my temples. They are burning. The fog of my breath on the bathroom mirror makes a shape of cloud or clover.

“I’m looking over a four-leaf clover that I overlooked before.”

Is it me singing now, or Art Mooney’s voice crooning through the walls of Le Chat Noir?

“One leaf is sunshine, the second is rain, third are the roses that grow in the lane . . . ” Distant and bluesy, not the way my mother played it on her baby grand.

At the table, you are waiting, drunk but more able than I. You have ordered something praline, and your lips are slick with remnants of cream. Meringue me! I am all mouth and no hands, fumbling for a tiny swatch of silver.

“Do you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“No need explaining, the one remaining is somebody I adore!”

Candles flicker. Your breath has a cadence to it. Buzzing again at the back of my eyes. “Cheers, cheers, to your golden birthday.”

Our glasses clank, our fingers jostle. If I could, I would swallow you whole.

Cornflower

(Centaurea cyanus) Also known as bachelor’s button, which refers to the long-lasting quality of the flower when cut and placed in the buttonhole of a shirt or suit. Decades ago, bachelors sported the flower when they went courting. These dark blue flowers grow wild in cornfields and bloom until the harvest begins.1

There is no question life was simpler with a man. Simple, I say, not easy. Whenever an established precept came into doubt (who would wash the dishes, who would argue with the paper boy)—whenever one fascicle of our human-ness chafed or challenged the other’s, leaving a fresh choice to be made—we fell back into our genders like warm blankets. Many sentences began, “After all, he is the man,” and many others, “How typical of her, being a woman.” Pronouns puzzle me as even such small words are weighted differently. When I hear or speak them, I notice this discrepancy: the heavy-stone hiss of his, commandment masquerading as adjective; and her, feather-light and flexible, just trifling, not wanting to impose. I remember a campfire tale about a man who froze to death in the forest because his wife had sewn tiny magnets inside his mittens, and over time the magnets altered the arrows on his compass so they no longer provided an accurate reading. He had no idea where he was going, so he just walked in circles till he died.

At one time, I longed to be the second in a fresh set of towels: his ‘n’ hers, with the glossy gold cursive and the monogram: a letter I would not recognize and could only claim by proxy: Mrs. Fill-in-the-Blank, as if I was missing an ingredient or had been assembled incomplete.

On an interview: List three adjectives that best describe you. Messy, elusive, snarled. Did I lie? Did I misrepresent myself? Warning: batteries not included. Small print, hoping no one would notice.

But when I met you, the story does not turn fairy tale. The wanderer in the forest does not stumble upon a gingerbread house, only to open the door and find a sensual Wicca waiting to shampoo her hair and bring her to climax in front of the fire. No rose petals and bear-skin rug. No felicity with figs and feathers.

Instead, each year when the spring comes, I line my collar with little blue flowers and ask again, with foreknowledge and flush, will you please come outside and walk around in circles with me?

Amaryllis

(Also Hippeastrum) Meaning “splendid beauty” or “pride,” Amaryllis was a popular woman’s name in ancient Greece. The petals are known to be flamboyantly red and will flower after two years of culture.

Time is what there is never enough of. But Sappho says, and I believe her—The moon rose full, and as around an altar, stood the women.

It would be false to say: it is your woman-ness I love, and this only.

It would be false to say: it is your human-ness I love, and this only, regardless of sex, irrespective of gender.

What is true is that I have loved you longer than three years now. There is no foreseeable finish to the heart’s interminable project . . .

. . . and only rough proof of such elaborate geometry.

Queen Anne’s Lace

Prolific wildflower. Can be found growing untended along roadsides and fields almost anywhere in America. Left fallow, its seeds quickly spread.

“You’re in the South now, and in the South, it’s called ‘chiggerweed.’”

From the car window, you gesture to the frilly weed-flowers skirting the road, gathered in small colonies as if to protect themselves from invasion. Safety, always, in numbers.

“Why chiggerweed?” I repeat uncertainly.

“Because the heads of the flowers are full of them. Chiggers, I mean. Talk about a breeding ground . . . ”

We have driven seven days to see your family, my first venture over the Mason-Dixon line. And now, in the hard heat of the Tennessee summer, I feel a shiver coming on. Please, let them like me, please . . .

“There are some rich people over in Brentwood who wanted Queen Anne’s Lace for their wedding. They paid a lot of money to have it brought in from more rural places.” Your lips curling, your eyebrow raised. “And we were all just laughing, thinking how silly they were. Out here you pay people to have your weeds removed, or you leave well enough alone—that’s more likely.”

Irony, our mutual friend—yet I can’t resist:

“Maybe sometimes beauty’s enough.” (Your eyes rolling now.) “Maybe, for the flowers’ sake, the chiggers are worth it.”

Moon Flower & Morning Glory

(Ipomoea alba & Ipomoea tricolor) Moon flowers open in the evenings so they can be pollinated by night-flying moths. Their white complexion attracts moths, and they emit a sweet and not-too-potent fragrance. The moon flower is a close relative of the morning glory, which opens in the morning so it can be pollinated by bees and other insects active during the day.2

We are perfect opposites, you and I. How in the evenings, as night descends softly over the day casting its wild and prodigious shadows, you come alive inside. Your eyes dilate like cats’ eyes in darkness: bright, attentive. Your second wind a breath blowing all through the house, rousing the ferns, ruffling the curtains. I fall asleep in your arms, recede to where it is safe: pillow of your solar plexus.

Then, morning: what the proverbs call wiser than the eve. But it isn’t wisdom we’re talking about. It’s the way our bodies bend toward the light, sun or moon, warm or cool, and blossom each in their separate times. I hold you close to me in the wreckage of our bed—the cast-off covers and scattered clothes—and allow myself the privilege of your face. Those eyelashes long as harp strings, and the quiver of your mouth against a dream.

How can it be, two flowers of the same species, the distinctness of their geotropic designs?

Describe in one sentence the person you love.

She holds me when I fall asleep in the evening; I hold her till she awakens in the dawn.

Love • Lies • Bleeding

(Amaranthus) The entire gesture of Love-Lies-Bleeding is downward, each plant forming sweeping arches that embrace the Earth. The color of the plant is vibrant, with magenta and red infusing the stems and seeds. The “bleeding out” of the Amaranthus relates to its healing quality. Love-Lies-Bleeding has proven to be a powerful balm for those undergoing great physical and psychological pain.3

When I thought for the first time I would lose you, everything stopped. Every muscle in my body coiled. They mentioned “surgery,” “treatments,” and “health care costs,” but all I could hear was “death.” Death, like the distant chill of a post-hypnotic suggestion. How that word followed me, crouched and hovered, threatening to bring you harm.

It doesn’t matter that in the end it was all “a terrible mistake,” that they had “overestimated the extent of the problem.” The damage was done. Some great and necessary illusion had been shattered. What mattered was not that I would have given my life for you, every last drop of my veins. I knew that already; I understood going in. But this notion that there might be nothing I could do—no cell to harvest, no skin to graft—that I would be asked to do the unthinkable: to surrender: a life that was not my own and without which my own life could not continue.

“Such melodrama,” you sigh, but I am not lying. When death comes for you in his carriage—may it be years from now—I will have my own suitcases waiting, affairs arranged. He must also stop—kindly—for me.

Mistletoe

Evergreen parasitic plant, growing on the branches of trees, where it forms pendent bushes, two to five feet in diameter. It grows and has been found on almost any deciduous tree, preferring those with soft bark, and being, perhaps, commonest on old apple trees, though it is frequently found on the ash, hawthorn, and lime and other trees. On the oak, it grows very seldom. Mistletoe is a true parasite, for at no period does it derive nourishment from the soil, or from decayed bark, like some fungi do. All nourishment is obtained from its host. The roots become woody and thick.4

Yes, I was always a romantic. In college, with my first boyfriend in Eugene, Oregon: how we spent hours driving around, searching for the perfect tree. “It has to be an oak,” I remember saying, though I have since learned that mistletoe on oak trees is less than likely. So, we were chasing in part a myth, and also in part a wish: that we would be happy together; that our search would be finished before it had even begun.

At last, in the parking lot of a Presbyterian church, we watched as a magisterial oak trembled in the throes of a storm: branches broken off and strewn across the windshield of his father’s newly polished car. When the wind had lessened and the world stood still, we stepped out to admire the damage. And there, still clinging to the lower limbs of the tree, was mistletoe—live mistletoe with its lovely berries—and I climbed up desperate to reach it.

What a triumph it was, kissing him in his father’s car with my arms full of mistletoe and still more scattered across the dash. They were, for that moment, the best kisses of my life because, in my young logic, I believed somehow I had earned them.

But you I have kissed more than a million times, more than any other human alive. Not once under the mistletoe. Spontaneous kisses, sleepy kisses, just-waking-up kisses and joyous-celebration kisses. I have kissed you to cure hiccups (yours and mine), kissed you in the midst of a laugh and a yawn. I have kissed you salty at the seashore, sticky in the rain, in every season, night or day, in thirty-eight states of this country, the District of Columbia, and Canada.

Not one was earned, required, or deserved. Yet each kiss a kiss to build a dream on . . .

September Flower

(Aster dumosus and Aster novae-angliae) Mostly perennials, a few are annuals and biennials. All have alternate, simple leaves that are untoothed or toothed but rarely lobed. In late summer and autumn the asters produce large clusters of flowering heads, although a few species have single heads. Each head contains a central disk of small yellow (sometimes orange, purple, or white), tubular flowers surrounded by numerous showy, ray flowers ranging from blue or violet shades of purple, to red, pink, or white. The ray flowers are never yellow. The tubular flowers are bisexual, having both a pistil and stamens; the ray flowers are usually sterile.5

For many years, I had a friend I loved. She was quiet, pensive, a writer of substance and insight. We lived together in college, and upon my return from six months abroad, she asked me to give a reading and blessing at her wedding. I remember the words I spoke, borrowed from Shakespeare at her request: Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments.

Maybe she was young and making a mistake. Maybe she was afraid, having never been with another man and fearing no other would love her as well. I did not judge. I did not admit impediments but raised my glass in celebration.

Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove.

Sometimes we all foolishly believe that what we seek and crave and occasionally discover is desirable for everyone, and worse: that we are the best doctors to prescribe such happiness for others. I lived the next two years emulating what my friend had done—searching for the husband who would love me above all others, whose presence would assuage my doubts and grant me absolution from my perennial loneliness.

One night, in the humid gleam that is September, I called my friend and told her, “I have found love, and where I least expected. I was not looking for her, and yet, there she was.”

Oh no, it is an ever-fixed mark which looks on tempests and is never shaken.

Again, the power of the pronoun, the dread of alteration. I heard my friend’s silence, terrible and tenuous, on the other end of the phone and knew at once I had stepped out onto a tightrope for which there was no net.

At last: “I don’t know what to say. I don’t understand what’s happened.”

“I told you what happened. I’m in love. Isn’t it wonderful?”

“But with a woman?!” Whispering the last word as though it had become suddenly shameful. “How is that possible?! What are you . . . I mean . . . are you . . . bisexual now? Is that it?”

“Maybe. I guess. I hadn’t really thought about it. Do you hear what I’m saying? I’m in love!”

It is the star to every wand’ring bark, whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

“You never said anything about this before. You didn’t tell me you were capable of—”

She was crying, and in the past, I would have been the one to console. But now it was me, helpless, insisting, “What does it matter who I love? Why do I need a label?”

Then, my friend, the one I had trusted beyond reproach, who had trusted me the same, voiced her betrayal with a new and forceful clarity: “I don’t care if you’re bisexual. Everyone knows it’s just code for lesbian anyway. You lead people along for a while, give them hope that maybe—”

I didn’t ask what she meant. I knew what she meant. Hope that it wasn’t true, that the phantom girl-crush would evaporate, and with it, the possibility of such unthinkable things.

“I changed in front of you.” And she wept openly now. “Think of what you’re giving up! You can’t get married, have children. You’ll never be able to make a baby with her. Your love can never make a baby!”

It’s true I always imagined I would have children, that when September came, I would walk with my sons and daughters down a lane covered with auburn leaves and wait on a quiet corner until their school bus came. Of course it’s still possible, as anything is, but I am no longer counting on the future to redeem the present. I prefer to view my life the other way around.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Daffodils

(Narcissus species) Upright, slender medium green leaves. Flower consists of a flattened round base (perianth) with wavy margin and a cup-shaped center (corona), often in a contrasting color.

Confession:

When I brought you the flowers, they were also for me. Perhaps they were the gift I secretly desired. Because it is hard to resist giving others what we want for ourselves. Because I love you, and daffodils also.

But that day, caught in a rainstorm, I ducked into a little flower shop on Forbes Avenue. And of the wide array of roses and tulips, carnations and lilies, it was these flowers—orange at the center and green at the stems—that beckoned me from their dark woven basket.

“I’ll take a bunch of the daffodils,” I said, and the woman wrapped them in tissue, then cellophane, and pushed a small square of paper toward me.

“For the card,” she said—in case I was unfamiliar with the ritual.

And I hesitated, because I knew this bouquet might mean nothing to you. But they were beautiful, and it felt wrong to keep them all to myself, so I brought them to your office and laid them down on your desk, and the card, bubbled from rain with blue ink bleeding, said only:

“The perfect contrast . . . ” which was plainspoken, the way you prefer; which was impressive, coming from me.

Corsage Orchid

(Cattleya labiata) C. labiata is one of the most vigorous Cattleya species and undoubtedly the easiest to grow. After flowering, it should be allowed to rest, and water should be given sparingly. Too much water during its rest period will rot the roots and hinder growth in the spring. They generate huge frilled flowers in pinks, purples, yellows, and white, reminiscent of prom dresses and other formal gowns.

At the Christmas party, when the men and women danced together, each accepted and acknowledged couple in his suit and her flowing gown, I must admit I almost admired them: their fearless interaction with the other’s form, their practiced symmetry of motion. They did not see it as an act of “entitlement.” They did not imagine anyone had been “excluded.” But suddenly, all I could think of was taking your hand and walking out onto that island of light.

Dance with me, I want my arms around you, the charms about you, will carry me through to . . .

Two men from our table excused themselves. They had put in their appearance but wearied quickly of the pretense. Everywhere the couples like those on the tops of wedding cakes, and our sore-thumbishness: the pieces of a set that didn’t match.

. . . Heaven, I’m in Heaven, and my heart beats so that I can hardly speak, and I seem to find the happiness I seek . . .

At home in stocking feet with Joni Mitchell serenading, we discover a dance without spectacle that leads where the music does not follow.

Forget • Me • Nots

(Myosotidium hortensia) Legend has it that in medieval times, a knight and his lady were walking along the side of a river. He picked a posy of flowers, but because of the weight of his armor he fell into the river. As he was drowning he threw the posy to his loved one and shouted, “Forget-me-not.” This is a flower connected with romance and tragic fate. It was often worn by ladies as a sign of faithfulness and enduring love.6

I begin to forget my life before you, and then to forget that I have forgotten. The past swells with imaginative amnesia, and I begin to remember you in places you could not have been!

Do you see us? Smoking cigarettes on the back steps of the Catholic school after the nuns had all gone home. Flicking our ashes in unison.

Then the future also, in luminous palimpsest: what I see is our lives branching together, the letters of our stories intertwined; tracing your script like ivy, like the dotted lines in a cursive book for a sentence that is not yet finished.

Sword Lily

(Gladiolus) Funnel-shaped florets arranged tightly along a stout spike with blooms opening from bottom to top. Possesses a strong geotropic response and will bend toward the light. Parts of the plant body are poisonous to the touch and tongue. 7

“Love, as you know, is a harrowing event”—Anne Carson wrote, and she was right.

It is difficult at times to determine what you are fighting for, and what you are fighting against. I remember the day you told me, “I don’t want to spend my life defending my life; I want to spend my life living it.”

And I agreed, my whole body sighing its consensus. Yet how does this living happen? How do we surrender our weapons without forfeiting the war?

Sometimes when I am indicted for aberrant deeds, when the eyes at the copy machine avert suddenly or focus a little too hard—as if determined to see through me—I remember that I do not walk the same in the world as I did before, my arm slung lazily through a man’s. And I think over and over, there is something wrong with a world where a woman’s value is contingent upon her escort.

What is the worst name anyone has ever called you?

Lesbian. (I meant it too.)

Because for a name to be real, it must be chosen. For a name to stick, it must hold true in some heart-felt and unassailable way.

Remember when we first left the comforts of the West Coast for the startling topography of the future? Time and space, both moving forward and out of our hands, gritty under the car wheels and the finger nails. It was all anticipation, which is terror and joy blurring the lines like a car winding down a steep road after dark.

I don’t think I had ever felt “judged” before—not so palpably that my skin turned splotchy and goose-bumped and my throat became hoarse—until we stopped to eat in a quaint restaurant, just south of Cannon Beach off Highway 101 in Oregon. The “Pig ‘n’ Pancake” it was called. There was one in Seaside too, and a little further north, in Astoria. My parents used to bring me there on family vacations, one of the few times each year we ate out. I loved the pink booths and paper napkins (the ones at home were cloth), and sitting up to the table and choosing a meal meant partaking of any possibility. So many choices.

But that day in Cannon Beach, the dark stares of strangers with their children, reading us over their spectacles, studying us as if to calculate the precise nature and ratio of threat. I felt monstrous, looming, as if everyone was cowering at my feet, then rising up, slowly, to meet me at my height. All I had wanted was breakfast, but I sensed from every solemn face that we weren’t wanted there. Not our short hair, not our out-of-state plates, not our unringed fingers and the confidence that carried us, first to our table, and shortly thereafter, away.

It is a different world since loving you, I can’t pretend. People don’t smile at me the way they used to: that friendly human generosity, expecting nothing in return. Sometimes I miss it. Maybe that’s cowardly of me. Maybe that’s weak. But in my own love, always, I grow stronger.

Wallflower

(Cheiranthus) Old-fashioned, profuse, bright-orange garden flower which tends to “bloom itself to death.” Short flowering season, unreliably perennial, and an infamous lure for butterflies.

I am no good at parties, especially arriving alone. I stand too long in the doorway, as if trying to decide, Can I still escape? Will anyone notice me slipping away?

That night in October, my first excursion of graduate school, I deliberated about my bottle of wine: share with a room full of strangers, or go home and drink it alone?

And you were there, the girl from class with the crazy eyes, blue like a raspberry ICEE. (And why are those blue to begin with?)

You were drinking blackberry wheat beer, your hair pulled back off your face in a sweeping motion. I approached you at once, and we commenced a conversation without struggle. None of the awkwardness, none of the familiar foreboding. Yes, I thought, I’d like to learn more about her. Listen to the way her words come soft and sharp like arrows from a supple bow.

I left early that night, suddenly nervous, despite your best-intentioned offer to take me home. What was it I was so afraid of? The ease or the intensity? The possibility of what reactions our “chemistry” might ignite?

To this day, I am not sure we have ever finished that conversation. I watch for the little blue ellipses that connect our thoughts and fractured sentences.

We shall not cease from exploration,

And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started from and know the place for the first time.

I want the circuitous conversation, prolepsis, catharsis. I want the gentle waver of the tongue, and each story upon another time . . .

Pink Lady’s Slipper

(Cypripedium acaule) Endangered wildflower, which takes a long time to grow and is often “collected” by orchid lovers. The plant has only two leaves, which are green and branch out from the stem like a child’s drawing. The deep pink flower, which resembles a ballet shoe, is unique in that it remains tightly closed except for a small opening. They generally grow in shady forests under pines, oaks, red maples, and sweetgum trees.

In the old days, I used to sell shoes, and after hours attending to feet I did not know, I became convinced the foot was the ugliest part of the body. Those nubby toes! Those callused heels! Who could love a thing so vile?

Then, I met you, and even your toes were interesting, even your heels worthy of pumice-love and wild profusions of kisses.

With you, I never seem to have my feet on the ground. Always a trailing of cloud lace, some whimsy swaddled around . . .

You have seen me on my right foot, my wrong foot, always struggling to put the best one forward.

You have felt my cold feet quiver, casting back the dangling fiancé.

My sprung feet, my stunned feet, my feet of clay . . .

And in all these things, I am at your feet, on your side, under your wing, bright in the eyes with longing.

Until I have one foot in the grave, and then the other, I will love you as I have never loved another.

Iris

These flowers have three petals called the “standards,” and three outer petal-like sepals called the “falls.” Once flower buds reach maturity, the base of the flower elongates to push the bud out from the sheath that surrounds it. Once extended, flower opening occurs.8

You’re just too good to be true. I can’t take my eyes off of you . . .

“Always with the old songs,” you say. Always with the premature retrospectives.

But what’s the crime in looking back as we move forward? In the picture swelling to panorama the way a barren garden suddenly springs to bloom?

Iris: The goddess of the rainbow and messenger of the gods

Iris: The pigmented, round, contractile membrane of the eye, suspended between the cornea and lens and perforated by the pupil. It regulates the amount of light entering the eye.

Iris: Any of numerous plants of the genus Iris, having narrow sword-shaped leaves and showy, variously colored flowers.

Iris: A rainbow or rainbow-like display of colors.

So many colors en potentia . . . So many possible meanings . . .

You’re just too good to be true. I can’t take my eyes off of you.

Rose

(Rosa) Intricate flower characterized by strong fragrance in many varieties, soft petals, and stems lined with thorns. The most popular flower of the romance industry, the rose now blossoms “naturally” in every color but blue.

We want the impossible: immortality, easy love, sufficient passion, reckless freedom, and abundant cushions when we fall. We are wise to remember what the Spanish say: No hay rosas sin espinas. There are no roses without thorns.

And while I know full well roses are not the answer—or even the first curled frond of the explanation— it feels good, again, to be told we are beautiful, to blush once more in a lover’s arms.

Once again, desire—
That looser of limbs and bitterly sweet—
Makes me to tremble

You are irresistible . . .

—Sappho, Fragment 130

If I could, I would give you a blue rose—its sumptuous paradox, its bittersweet beauty.

Julie Wade