My father has a greenhouse.
He's a florist.
And it didn't occur to me till fairly recently that
was a poetic subject.
So I wrote a poem about flowers.
I worked in the greenhouse a lot.
Of course, most flower families do that.
They're usually mom and pop type operations.
This poem is called "Flowers and a Life"
and it comes in nine sections.
But I'm not going to read the parts.
Usually those numbers, it strikes me,
are just a way of avoiding form.
So I'll just read it without the numbers,
"Flowers in a Life."
"Always back to the flowers.
They were the earliest thing.
My father and his greenhouse for 40 years
surrendering season after season to roses.
The Austrian growers were muddy as roots.
They chewed tobacco, and spat on the ground.
I spit and they laughed.
My clear spit settled like a drop of thick water
on the ground.
Their spit was brown and flecked with sharpness.
So many years in the minds of horticulture.
So much swallowed Earth.
I thought when I grow up, I will spit dirt too.
Don't call it dirt, the old grower
said when I played at his potting table.
This is earth that's here.
Rosebuds on a plate.
Flowers never seemed feminine before.
Only men in the greenhouses surrounded
by a million pink blossoms.
But I was surrounded by flowers.
A small honorary male in a man's world.
I could watch for hours.
I had assumed flowers have blood in their veins,
but even I understood the orchid is a bloodless creature.
Nothing will ever be so white again.
Their coolness, the damp heat of their mansions.
I noticed this too.
Only the rich asked to see the orchid house.
The florist must be a businessman
in the midst of flying pollen, odor, a desire for sleep.
He knows money does not fade like the flower.
I found lilacs on my own coming home
from school like everyone else.
The National flower was a private odor,
dying We will each one day see the lilac flare up
with its flask of stars.
At the center of the anemone, loveliness stops.
It disappears, tightens, blackens, bristles.
Balls itself into a furry mound of privacy.
Does every woman want to be beautiful?
Not beautiful but a flower?
The black knob of furry sex finally
exposed to the damp petals of red, of purple, white.
Through the thrilling amber to the black cat of privacy.
You as a flower.
You and myself, who am something reaching to.
If I could hold up one thing to show you
what I mean about myself lately, it
would be this yanked out Swedish Ivy potted in pure air.
No water.
No earth.
And yet not dying either.
But I wanted to show you yourself for once.
The flower has no name.
It has long life.
Its father was a tree in Colorado.
The blossom itself must be yellow and shivers
like a wind bell.
It cannot remember its roots.
But they are knotted like a tree's and heavy.
It has the odor of dirt, like a new mushroom.
Like the Moss rose, it opens its bright face to the sun early
and is alone in joy.
We have loved flowers and poems about flowers.
You told your mother to plant a lilac over your grandmother's
grave because it is the poet's flower.
You read me the Old Man's poem about the asphodel
to make me love you again.
So if I call you a flower this one time, I have reason.
I've always been accurate in my heart.
Where your name, that gold wand, has swept the air before me
so long.
I love you.
I love the yellow rose.
I'm at home with flowers, and will begin this life,
like every other one, with a blossom held out
to the flaming mountain."
[APPLAUSE]