Abundance

I Once I had 1000 roses. Literally 1000 roses. I was working for a florist back in the shambling ‘Thirties when iced skids of 250 roses sold for $2 at Faneuil Hall. So for $8 I bought 1000 roses, 500 white and 500 red, for Connie’s wedding to steadiness. I strewed the church aisle whole and the bride came walking on roses, roses all the way: The white roses and the red roses. White for the bed we had shared. Red for the bed she went to from the abundance in her to the fear in what she wanted. The gift was not in the roses but in the abundance of the roses. To her whose abundance had never wholly been mine, and could never be his. He had no gift of abundance in him but only the penuries of sobriety. A good steady clerk, most mortgageable, returning in creaking shoes over the white and the red roses. Returning over the most flowering he would ever touch, with the most flowering I had ever touched. A feast of endings. II This morning I passed a pushcart heaped with white carnations as high as if there had fallen all night one of those thick-flaked, slow, windless, wondering snows that leave shakos on fence posts, polar bears in the hedges, caves in the light, and a childhood on every sill. Once, twice a year, partially, and once, twice a lifetime, perfectly, that snow falls. In which I ran like a young wolf in its blood leaping to snap the flower-flakes clean from the air; their instant on the tongue flat and almost dusty and not enough to be cold. But as I ran, face-up, mouth open, my cheeks burned with tears and flower-melt, and my lashes were fringed with gauze, and my ears wore white piping. There is no feast but energy. All men know—have known and will remember again and again—what food that is for the running young wolf of the rare days when shapes fall from the air and may be had for the leaping. Clean in the mouth of joy. Flat and dusty. And how they are instantly nothing— a commotion in the air and in the blood. —And how they are endlessly all. III My father’s grave, the deepest cave I know, was banked with snow and lilies. We stuck the dead flowers into the snow banks dirty with sand and trampled by digger’s boots. The flowers, stiff and unbeckoning, ripped from their wires in the wind and blew their seasons out as snow Purer than the snow itself. A last abundance correcting our poverties. I remember the feasts of my life, their every flowing. I remember the wolf all men remember in his blood. I remember the air become a feast of flowers. And remember his last flowers whitening winter in an imitation of possibility, while we hunched black in the dirtied place inside possibility where the prayers soiled him. If ever there was a man of abundances he lies there flowerless at that dirty center whose wired flowers try and try to make the winter clean again in air. And fail. And leave me raging as the young wolf grown from his day’s play in abundance to the ravening of recollection. Creaking to penury over the flower-strew. IV This morning I passed a pushcart heaped beyond possibility, as when the sun begins again after that long snow and the earth is moonscaped and wonderlanded and humped and haloed in the light it makes: an angel on every garbage can, a god in every tree, that childhood on every sill.—At a corner of the ordinary. Where is she now? Instantly nothing. A penury after flower-strew. Nothing. A feast of glimpses. Not fact itself, but an idea of the possible in the fact. —And so the rare day comes: I was again the young wolf trembling in his blood at the profusions heaped and haloed in their instant next to the ordinary. And did not know myself what feast I kept —till I said your name. At once all plenty was. It is the words starve us, the act that feeds. The air trembling with the white wicks of its falling encloses us. To be perfect, I suppose, we must be brief. The long thing is to remember imperfectly, dirtying with gratitude the grave of abundance. O flower-banked, air-dazzling, and abundant woman, though the young wolf is dead, all men know—have known and must remember— You.