Flowers
I think of each life as a flower
—Mary Oliver
Please don’t hate me for telling you this, but I’ve never much cared for flowers.
Oh, not because I sneeze and wheeze and choke and fuss whenever I’m near them, though that’s certainly a factor, and unlike Baudelaire, I don’t see them as mal
it’s just that (and I’m almost afraid to admit it)
I’ve never quite felt the rapturous rhapsody or drunken delight or blissful beauty or beatific grace that others, especially those who spend lots of time with their chapped hands in the muddy earth, get when prattling on about foliage, perennials, and open buds (the secret women’s places that were O’Keeffe’s raison d’etre)
and it has always made me a little sad.
Flowers are living things and we all want to live, now more than ever, and suddenly I’m basking in a photosynthetic glow. And I think to myself, maybe this time they won’t droop and die so quickly. Maybe they’ll stay around awhile.
(And then she had an epiphany!)
I vow to be partial to peonies à la Mary Oliver. Like the good doctor W.C. Williams, I will kiss every asphodel I meet in all the backyards of Rutherford, New Jersey. I will pray to the heavens about that mighty force that through the green fuse* drove that flower. I will chant, chant, chant to the sunflowers that William Blake adored (and that Allen Ginsberg co-opted while perhaps inhaling them a bit too deeply in his tenement haze).
And as for those resplendent open-mouthed tulips, so cherished in the Netherlands? Yes, yes, I can almost hear them breathing, just as Plath** did from her godforsaken hospital bed.
But without the melancholia.
*Dylan Thomas, “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower”
** Sylvia Plath, “Tulips”
Cindy Hochman is the founder of “100 Proof Copyediting Services,” the editor emerita of the long-running poetry journal First Literary Review-East, and the author of Telling You Everything (Unleash Press, 2022). Her newest book, I Am the Girl, is slated for publication in 2026 by Rain Mountain Press’s Cassandra Series. Cindy resides in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, where she meditates, does tai chi, and studies the Russian language.