In Search of Eden at the New York Botanical Garden
There’s a Kusama sculpture exhibit. Gigantic blooming cartoons born of urethane and aluminum
rising amongst the lilies, asters, wild rose, and black-eyed Susan’s. Already
the hydrangea has ceded. Only the massive pond lilies hold their own.
In the leaflet, I read of Kusama’s love of nature. Think of Aristotle declaring art as imitation
of nature, think of artifice.
In the native plant section, my friend Dominic introduces me to the flora and foliage by name.
I follow his eye like a monarch butterfly skimming the goldenrod.
Before the Garden’s conservation vault of seeds and species, I conjure Darwin aboard
the HMS Beagle lolling in an undulating sea. The hull holding boxes of labeled insects, flowers,
mollusks and there, the prize Galapagos finches. Wings trimmed, beaks up, tailfeathers
like folded fans.
My mother traveled to the Galapagos. What did she gather there? Possibly only memories detailed
in tidy hand-written diaries I’ll come across one day.
As children, we knocked on doors for Earth Day, recycling drives, to scuttle development.
My mother planted trees, saved a woody ravine from the bulldozer.
I bulldoze my way through the Botanical Garden, collecting photos and the surreptitious touch
of leaf belly and petal. I surrender to goldfinch hovering over echinacea thistles, to the waltz of
white satin moths, to the dew-bent leaves of grass, surrender to the dew, evidence nature weeps
while we sleep.
Beneath an old growth forest canopy, the sky collapses into pinholes of light, imitating night.
Mark Doty, describing Eden in a poem, writes that there was no time then but a single day.
I long to stretch the body of this day in a hammock but the Garden is closing, returning me to the
Bronx hustling its edges like a hedge trimmer.
* * * * *
Objective Correlative
In the art from the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance, faces were impassive
while objects did the work of conveying emotions.
— Musée Marmottan Monet, Theater of Emotions Exposition
The subject holds an ivory box of emotions.
A stiff red carnation pinched between a bride’s fingers.
Her husband’s hands are bejeweled with rings, grasping
a folded contract.
The skull on a table speaks to her penance: she’s broken a dish,
the meat’s overcooked, her lack of enthusiasm for fellatio.
Hundreds of years pass like that — time sprinting
by without a twitch, a blink.
Then finally, a Renaissance tear clouds a subject’s gaze.
Her husband wrinkles his mouth into an ugly grin.
You can almost hear his jaw click into this unfamiliar shape.
Sometimes it’s easier to be the passive observer
of another’s emotions. My friend was trained to read
facial expressions with flash cards. What do you see
when the mouth bends down at the corners? Sad? Mad?
Uncertainty is a spectrum. What makes the subject cry?
Perhaps, a hundred lifetimes spent sitting and waiting.