Still Life With Flowers

It is an unseasonable March day. My kitchen blinds are drawn against morning sun, their slender slats like new skin protecting the body's vital organs; eyelids before this rose-covered tablecloth as though the blooms are the pale larvae of our future, still coiled and sleepy, not-yet-flowers at the sill of this too-early spring, who would murmur, if so evolved: We are not ready to be born. I perspire at the sudden heat; the ceiling fan beats downward onto my damp corner, this alcove of waning winter. But the flowers: muslin washed to faded smoothness, blooms asymmetrical, each calyx waiting like fingers clasped in prayer to blossom into a new dimension, a heartfelt request to rejoin the living. And there are rhododendrons, pink with their baby freckles, tiny stamen-fingers reaching past those same pliant slats, this time of the crib of their incubation, to touch softly anything of strange newness of their coming fruition. We are dawning, come the earliest babblings; they know what they mean even if we do not. The first alien syllables fall on deaf carpeting and semi-gloss of these pale walls, absorbed and forgotten in stiff pleats of similar-colored curtains. In this house, in these manufactured shadows, I am still of winter, of our shared grief and shame at our compelling obscenity of civilization, knowing full well this structure stood as shelter against recent, freezing rains, the showering silver spears of a marauding infidel, who, as the earlier mulch of autumn, has come to dust, spent as the bride whose wedding dress falls away and disappears in a tatter of fallen leaves that soon dry up and disintegrate. In its place, in folds of new skin, comes a house of flowers, plant-life sacrificing itself on the altar, using its own bodies to erect its shrine. Suddenly this tabletop, awash in once-vibrant maroons, greens, pinks and whites, is a crystal ball. In this sphere of all-knowing I see things as they will be. This table is a loom and the cloth a tapestry, each thread a component of fabric to come. And the flowers: roses unscrolling; chrysanthemums bursting into the applause of dozens of tiny hands; hibiscus, the silent trumpets, all laid out on a bed of stems and leaves woven as the threads themselves upon which their likenesses have been cast, like a portrait painted in their own green blood. But these dragons stationed at the gates of paradise are only cotton heroes; it is March. It is too soon. This sudden heat will pass as this day passes, its images dissolving into memory as a stone obliterates the reflection in a tranquil pool. What I have seen will be, but not now. I am myself in this little room, the adult who must go about the tasks of day. But I am also an infant poised on a threshold, the golden crocus in first bloom, arriving prematurely. And I am held at this brink of fruition by a body not sufficiently evolved, being led away by a parent I barely recognize, who cannot offer consolation as he does not know the vision I have seen. As we move I look back, reaching with the bulb of my hand and its tiny sprouting fingers, for the image growing further out of reach, and I murmur gravely, half in knowledge, half in absentia, the only word I can pronounce: Flower.