International Rose Test Garden
I offer you a cup of tea made from the roses that survived the bomb, honeyed inside a porcelain cup painted with roses the bees would go wild over if they could see the color red or feel its electric field.
The ether, I say, seems to me to be embodied in the scent we inhale so the tea, when we are away from the garden, will remind us to breathe.
The flowers are earthed, but the air around is charged with one hundred volts for every meter above the ground: the pollen leaps from the flower when the bee buzzes near the way the thorn beckons our finger toward it even though we know there will be a welling of blood.
It’s electric.
I hum, Where are you going my river, my river, where are you going? To the sea, to the sea.
Before the garden, a woman read my tarot from a deck of her own making: my past is a grave reflected in mirrored sunglasses, a headless soldier, a toilet after a party, but she says, if I get through a series of three places—a mountain, a city in fog, a long river by raft—I will meet the two-thousand-pound wax man of judgment and, after that, find a place at last to rest my head.
In the middle, there’s a body with a hole at the head and at the heart and at the part of a woman that looks like a shell and underneath the first card I pulled: a shell she says could be emptiness or entry; I see, I say, like a flower.
Before I go, she asks me to write down my shame so I write, didn’t ask the question, and drop it in the anonymous box.
Like me, the bees are attracted to blue and see it like Monet does: deep and watery.
I’m wearing a shirt with a bunch of mixed-up letters and nearby another woman shouts, What is it?
It has to say something!
There are the letters, H, A, N ...
T.S. Eliot writes, in a note about the tarot cards read in The Waste Land, that the Hanged Man is associated in his mind with the Hanged God, which has to do with a ritual of sacrifice.
Something must be destroyed in order for something else to grow, the theory goes.
Of the fun facts about shame I’m handed, I’m attracted to to be shameless is to play God.
Quick, boys!
The bombs are falling and you can save just one thing, what is it?
The roses.
Hybridists know each bloom is tender, born from crossing, so they sent the seeds overseas.
The garden we walk is an asylum for roses too rare for erasure.
Before and after, Eliot’s poem on the rose garden ends.
We played hangman one night to unravel a ladder; you look at me now in recognition and speak softly, Oh, HAPPINESS.
It’s been there all along on my chest.
What’s invisible to us the bees use to bind.
The ether, I say, seems to me to be embodied in the scent we inhale so the tea, when we are away from the garden, will remind us to breathe.
The flowers are earthed, but the air around is charged with one hundred volts for every meter above the ground: the pollen leaps from the flower when the bee buzzes near the way the thorn beckons our finger toward it even though we know there will be a welling of blood.
It’s electric.
I hum, Where are you going my river, my river, where are you going? To the sea, to the sea.
Before the garden, a woman read my tarot from a deck of her own making: my past is a grave reflected in mirrored sunglasses, a headless soldier, a toilet after a party, but she says, if I get through a series of three places—a mountain, a city in fog, a long river by raft—I will meet the two-thousand-pound wax man of judgment and, after that, find a place at last to rest my head.
In the middle, there’s a body with a hole at the head and at the heart and at the part of a woman that looks like a shell and underneath the first card I pulled: a shell she says could be emptiness or entry; I see, I say, like a flower.
Before I go, she asks me to write down my shame so I write, didn’t ask the question, and drop it in the anonymous box.
Like me, the bees are attracted to blue and see it like Monet does: deep and watery.
I’m wearing a shirt with a bunch of mixed-up letters and nearby another woman shouts, What is it?
It has to say something!
There are the letters, H, A, N ...
T.S. Eliot writes, in a note about the tarot cards read in The Waste Land, that the Hanged Man is associated in his mind with the Hanged God, which has to do with a ritual of sacrifice.
Something must be destroyed in order for something else to grow, the theory goes.
Of the fun facts about shame I’m handed, I’m attracted to to be shameless is to play God.
Quick, boys!
The bombs are falling and you can save just one thing, what is it?
The roses.
Hybridists know each bloom is tender, born from crossing, so they sent the seeds overseas.
The garden we walk is an asylum for roses too rare for erasure.
Before and after, Eliot’s poem on the rose garden ends.
We played hangman one night to unravel a ladder; you look at me now in recognition and speak softly, Oh, HAPPINESS.
It’s been there all along on my chest.
What’s invisible to us the bees use to bind.
Source: Poetry (February 2020)