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Instructions for Flowers

 

“paintings of flowers have to be really good since I’ve known flowers”

– Merry Fortune

 

There are flowers, and more flowers, and even more flowers suffocating me into submission. In a tree. In a park. In a photograph. In a memory. I know nothing of flowers. But I’ve known others who’ve known flowers, scattered along Front Range foothills, noting how the succession of blooming marks the seasons with a certain precision grown in loam. Generally speaking, my exile from the Internet has left me small. I shrink, and everything empties itself of flowers, scentless and senseless. Writing flowers leaves us less flowered, not, necessarily, more flowered of something else.




Joshua Ware

levelheaded: Instructions for Flowers

 

While the title of this week’s prose poem is “Instructions for Flowers,” the piece reads more like a failed attempt by the speaker to bloom. The idea that other people have known flowers but the speaker “know[s] nothing of flowers” suggests a couple things: 1) the speaker has not been afforded pleasures that others enjoy and 2) the speaker does not trust language to accurately portray the myriad ways flowers can mean.

 

These ideas are reinforced by the poem’s first sentence. Flowers, which typically have a positive connotation, are “suffocating [the speaker] into submission.” Though they may be lovely “In a tree” or “In a park,” the potential for flowers to be tragic comes through when we think of them “In a photograph” or “In a memory.” Flowers are complicated. They’re clutched by brides and laid on gravestones. So, with Socratic humility,  the speaker’s assertion that he doesn’t know them is, in essence, an acknowledgement that he doesn’t understand them.

 

Like emotions, flowers cannot be instructed. Joshua Ware also calls our attention to the ways that the act of writing—the act of discovering and recording our emotions—is similar to flowers growing. Some poems sprout organically like wildflowers “along Front Range foothills.” Others take shape thanks to a “certain precision,” and some pop up out of nowhere a la the surprising sentence “my exile from the Internet has left me small.”

 

Sadly, exploration of flowers through writing “leaves us less flowered,” maybe because in drawing the above comparisons we’re also made aware of the ways that flowers and writing are not alike. Maybe by exploring beauty we become acutely aware that there is so much beauty we will never be able to perceive.

 

 

– The Editors