Leveler Poetry Journal
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The peony

 

It was easy to decide which flower to cut.

Tissue-papery globe calling out Me, pick Me.

 

And I did. Sharp clip down-stem, faint

rosy scent, brushing away a tiny caterpillar

 

fallen from the plum tree into magenta petals.

I brought the flower into the house as if it were

 

mine. As if I could own a flower. As if I had

made it. As if the earth might forgive me

 

for this and all my other greedy excess:

my desire to own a single moment.

 

To say Mine, it’s Mine, to the shrub, the tree,

the caterpillar, the big-bellied deer who rests

 

in shade beneath the spruce to forget the pain

of her long-winter hunger, her wounded leg.

 

As if I could replace the moment I’ve stolen,

the breath I’ve borrowed, the light I’ve held.




J.I. Kleinberg

levelheaded: The peony

 

This poem begins with a death—or maybe it’s an amputation. Either way, it’s the “easy” quality of cutting a peony flower that the speaker is keen to examine in this poem. The poem is deceptively “easy” too. It’s a quiet, succinctly composed narrative/lyric poem about the impact we have on our world by simply existing. But there’s also a subtle critique of our inescapable self-regard. Even in the moments in which we are most acutely aware of the damage we do, it’s all about me, me, me.

 

In the very next line after the peony is selected for pruning, the speaker anthropomorphizes the flower. The flower calls out, “Me, pick Me.” The personification of the flower lets us understand the flower as a metaphor for our own random, questionably motivated existence, but, even more, the capitalized “Me” makes the flower’s pleading personal, as if the “Me” is a proper noun. It’s a funny moment because, as the speaker ventriloquizes the flower’s desire to be “picked,” she is the one doing the picking. She’s inclined to justify her actions, yet she also sees herself—her “Me”—pleading to be picked. Moments later, in an understated admission of her own blindness, the speaker brushes “away a tiny caterpillar / fallen from the plum tree into magenta petals.” Such care for the peony, and such disregard for the caterpillar. The speaker is the author of her empathy.

 

She muses, “As if I could own a flower,” and the poem shifts from its narrative mode into a more lyric mode. Here, the speaker interrogates her impulse to possess. She examines “her greedy excess.” She repeats the phrase “As if I could” to underscore the impossibility of escaping what she calls her greed. That phrase, “As if I could,” also helps mark the speaker’s awareness of her inability to stop claiming everything around her—”the shrub, the tree, / the caterpillar, the big-bellied deer.”

 

And even if she “could,” it’s not clear that she would. As the speaker reaches back for things she’s “stolen,” “borrowed,” and “held,” there’s a sense that the things she mentions—the moment, breath, and light—include the whole of her existence. She passes through this world with ease and her “desire to own.” The fleeting qualities of a moment, a breath, the light, or a peony snipped out of existence also apply to her. She is something temporary, but she is nothing without the things she has taken from this world.

 

-The Editors