First Flower

Jan noticed our first flowers for the year, two beautiful yellow crocuses. The crocus is in the iris family and displays the general characteristics of the family Iridaceae, which include basal cauline (arising from the aerial stem) leaves that sheath the stem base, hermaphrodite flowers that are showy, the perianth petaloid with two whorls of three tepals each and septal nectaries. The flowers have three stamens and a gynoecium of three united carpels and an inferior ovary, three locules and axile placentation with fruit that is a loculicidal capsule. Other than that it is a relatively simple flower. It closes up at night.  There was an apple tree in the yard — this would have been forty years ago — behind, only meadows. Drifts of crocus in the damp grass. I stood at that window: late April. Spring flowers in the neighbor’s yard. How many times, really, did the tree flower on my birthday, the exact day, not before, not after? Substitution of the immutable for the shifting, the evolving. Substitution of the image for relentless earth. What do I know of this place, the role of the tree for decades taken by a bonsai, voices rising from the tennis courts — Fields. Smell of the tall grass, new cut. As one expects of a lyric poet. We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory. — Louise Gluck