I associate amaryllis with the winter holidays. An exotic flower for us, gifted when we’re fortunate, and occupying a central and highly visible perch, usually in the kitchen. Not sure why the kitchen except that there’s water handy, and life revolves around the kitchen this time of year, so the progress — from voluminous bulb to strappy leaves and robust stems to extravagant blooms — is omnipresent. We comment on the rising and the unfolding, each time surprised by how much grandeur can explode out of that bursting bulb.
And like so many blooms that we cultivate, that we await and monitor and celebrate, the amaryllis is part of the elusive collection-cum-constellation I’ve been attempting to corral, the ingredients for a home. My home. For homeness. My homeness. What makes a house a home? Well, somewhere high on the list are plants. And this time of year, there may be no more regal reminder of how beholden I am to these exuberant houseguests.
Today, I’ll defer to these blooms, a gift from our friend, Jennifer Isaacson, and the words of three poets who’ve grappled with the mysterious amaryllis. I’ll start with the two middle stanzas from Connie Wanek’s “Amaryllis”.
Months ago the gigantic onion of a bulb
half above the soil
stuck out its green tongue
and slowly, day by day,
the flower itself entered our world,closed, like hands that captured a moth,
then open, as eyes open,
and the amaryllis, seeing us,
was somehow undiscouraged.
It stands before us now…
— Connie Wanek, “Amaryllis” (Source: Poetry Foundation)
Superb! This is the procession of anticipated joys, first small, then larger, then bigger than life. From this literal, accessible, potently visual poem of Wanek’s I turn to two separate sections in Henri Cole’s “My Amaryllis” that speak to this current journey in ways I can only cite and not explain. Not yet at least. Hopefully soon.
Like my amaryllis, I need a stone in my pot
as a ballast.
— Henri Cole, “My Amaryllis” (Source: The Atlantic)
The enigmatic push-pull I’ve been grappling with lately, this relationship with Rosslyn that has outlived our original expectations fourfold and yet that nurtures us and revitalizes us, the recognition that this ballast rights us in heavy seas, buoys us in a storm, this conundrum cloaked in an evening gown simultaneously whisks me off my feet and holds me steady. Where from here?
At present, the where resolves itself by slipping down a few lines to this.
Vain as Picasso,
mechanical as a beetle, I want to make
a thing I haven’t made that says,
Look how he’s evolved.
— Henri Cole, “My Amaryllis” (Source: The Atlantic)
I’ll step aside and let this stand on its own. Well done, Henri Cole!
And for my last point of reference, my final poetic meditation on the enchanting amaryllis, I refer you to “Amaryllis” by Glen Mott. Of the three, this poem is at once the most complex and the most intoxicating. I’ll spare Mott my clumsy scalpel, resist the temptation to cull lines that resonate, and instead crib the writer’s observation about the poem.
“Desert nightfall in a border town, an evening of estranged emotions at the edge of articulation, harder to name than pliant happiness. Something in the form of an epitaph for lapsed solemnity. A mendicant’s bouquet.” – Glenn Mott (Source: Academy of American Poets)
It’s not often that a footnote to a poem carries the same muscle, music, and mystery as the poetry it seeks to clarify, but there it is. Plaudits, poet.
I imagine that the work of a mosaic artist might not always involve compelling fragments to coalesce around the artist’s vision. I imagine that sometimes it is enough to gather the ingredients, to push them into proximity with one another, and then to retreat. This evening I will test out this theory. Either I will succeed. Or I will fail.
In either case a new blossom is opening, and the midwinter amaryllis will be even more exhilarating tomorrow.
What do you think?