Two Days in May

Wherein I hush and hear poems

May 15th, 2024

She was out on her balcony wearing a big sun-visor that reminded me of a flower petal. She talked of rhododendrons “I am obsessed by their variety and beauty.” She got caught up in an attempted explanation of what she likes about them - “It’s like a cloud, a cloud meets… something… not at all heavy, light like a feather…” She then began to personify them. Some are pretty ladies, and others little girls, and then there are the men. “In front of our house they are like soldiers” and she fell into her signature contagious laughter. Then it switched, how things switch in dreams, to being more the house that she was talking about rather than the flowers. The house and its landscaping. It is a soldier. “You feel safe inside, it has its beauty but it is orderly… strong. The man who owned it before us was an army person,” she says, and one cannot be sure which caused which but she knows the two are linked. Back to the flowers. “It is very romantic. Very very romantic.” and I say that she should do some creative writing about this, “It’s so poetic”, I say. She laughs. “It is how I think, it is part of me. I couldn’t take it away.” In my eyes are swimming visions of human flowers, dancing and reclining, a soldier house, a branch of soldier flowers. I feel alive this morning. This is how I’d love to talk to everyone— so free. Later my phone is blowing up with photos of rhododendrons. I smile at each one and marvel, she’s captured each of their faces. “By the way, which one do you think you are looking like?” I am smiling from my soul to the sky. I am the delicate periwinkle. At times, the cascading blue. And I will never forget the poem she wrote about her daughter and the hanging flowers. It was last summer and I can still feel the pulse of it and see its pinkness. And this was never in any book. It was mostly never written down. When I feel this connected in life it seems like the most delicate thing that I have gotten to experience. It’s like a butterfly landing on your knee; you know it could never have happened if you hadn’t sat quite still and been patient and impossibly quiet. Hush and hear the poems, and look and see the hidden world of the flowers. All of this was there, is there, but not just anyone would have noticed. Listen more to what people have to say and you might encounter surprising things, singularities, hilarious jokes, treasures of the human mind. I have been silent and I have heard things. I have begun to move slowly and I have felt things. Oh now I remember!!! The feeling is the thing. How do I explain this?

May 16th, 2026

San Francisco, sun-soaked. I have been given the color green. I search for it. My outdated though shockingly new iphone camera is almost like an old worn fisherman’s net. I lay it out around a thing and pull. Green apples in a pile at the Japanese supermarket! An expanse of grass! Shiny plastic wall reflecting us back! Catch, catch, catch. When my little friend brought me back a bendy stick, I being seated in a patch of daisies, there was only one thing to do. These fingers have gotten good at small tedious projects. I set about the weaving and knotting of a flower crown. She picked the daisies— “Remember, long stems!” I said. In response, a big gush of words, woven together with effort, ending in … “because flowers are very delicate” and those three syllables sounded so big in her tiny mouth. How smart she is! Delicate indeed, there were casualties, but mostly I pulled the knotted stems just tight enough and it held together. There were coronations. Pink leaves were tucked in, facing skyward, so that they looked much like that feather sticking out of Peter Pan’s cap. And we wore the crowns quite proudly as we walked back up the street to go sit beneath a pink ceiling and order a dozen oysters.