This one's called "Night of the Marigolds."
During the pandemic, I was playing a pretty great window
box game, and a lot of marigolds and a lot of petunias,
and you know what petunias do at night,
that fragrance is so beautiful.
Can you grow petunias here?
Is that asking a lot?
Yeah, they can-- they can they manage get to work, yeah.
It's called "Night of the Marigolds."
Look how the marigolds in the darkness
catch the lamplight from inside the apartment
and bounce it back to us, warning
that we come to be known by the way we respond to what we
suffer, which is to say by what we have suffered and not
by what we are.
In Delacroix's painting of a horse frightened by a storm,
the animal summarizes thunderclouds lit by lightning
more than horse, unless there's something
essential to the horse that's unrecognizable as such
until provoked by force.
There have been times I've wondered about myself,
not knowing what it was compared to what it might have been
or what it isn't, tumbling it over
in my mouth like raw stone.
After a long night of it, if I take the stone out of my mouth,
what surprises me isn't how smooth it
is because I expected it to be smooth,
but the fact that I have either tumbled--
troubled it into the shape of a horse,
or else sucked away the not-horse
that kept it from becoming the object it has always
meant to be,
Now we are riding into the night.
Marigolds towering over us drop their scent in waves.
Our breathing slows-- the horse and I
are in complete communication.
The matter of what we mean embeds us
like a warm Egyptian loam.
There's no disputing it.