Mark MacDonald - 2
Flower Child ~ for BirdieSuppose it were true: she was abducted by aliens--
bored but gentle beings cruising through the universe, tired after light years of travel, looking for some proof of intelligent life outside of the Sunflower Galaxy. Suppose, as she told us, that they communicated mostly through an incredibly refined and acute sense of smell; that they found the scent of pine needles more pleasing and more interesting than the citizens of Minneapolis, Paris, London, New York or Rome? Suppose that instead of talking to the President, they landed their spaceship shaped like a sunflower deep in the Brazilian rain forest and spent a couple of weeks laughing and singing with the Crimson Topaz Hummingbirds and sharing their poems, constructed entirely of sweet and extraordinary scents, with a Blue Morpho Butterfly resting on the petals of a Passion Flower growing along the banks of a stream? Suppose that this were true—suppose that she had been abducted by aliens with noses as long and as narrow as a straw—suppose that it were true. Would not this explain why she moved to the state of Florida, bought a small cottage and covered its yards with Baby’s Breath, Jupiter’s Beard, Hollyhock Mallow and blossoming orange trees? Suppose that it were true; just consider that it could have happened. Suppose that she splashes her neck and her breasts with lavender each morning and talks to her flowers, not because she is crazy, not because she is strange, but because she was abducted by aliens who taught her the language of fragrances soft and exotic; that she stands in her yard with a handful of roses because what she wants most is to be lifted away? The Daughter of Two MothersBorn in Des Moines in the late 1930’s,
she never quite understood her father but felt close to her Aunt—the aunt who never married and lived with her friend near a bookstore downtown. Her mother grew chrysanthemums—renowned as one of the Four Gentlemen in Chinese and East Asian art—The Chrysanthemum, The Bamboo, The Orchid and the Plum Blossom. A flower for each season, they belong to the category of bird-and-flower painting in China during the Song Dynasty, according to her Aunt—the aunt who liked wine and sometimes ate with chopsticks—the aunt who never married and lived with her friend near a bookstore downtown. The Baker's DozenPerhaps in a parallel universe
the truth is neither a journey nor a paycheck, the Pythagorean Theorem, a collection of precepts in a medieval manuscript, a forest, a clearing, a slogan on a t-shirt, or a steep granite cliff from which a couple must leap. It could be that in nothern New Mexico what the philosophers call oblivion is merely a lizard—or a rock and a lizard-- anything gone blank or motionless and that can sit beneath the sun for hours at a time. There may be some options in Syria the President may wish to consider, and perhaps when we are dead, the abyss is no longer the throat of a panther, a cup of cold coffee or joblessness; the wind ends its search and its longing; and the fires we once called love will have collapsed into smolder. PhenomenaThis bird or that—the pigeon just dropped
to the curbside to feed, or the Florida Spruce Jay gone nearly extinct? An event from your childhood you had hoped to forget—the long vacant house and the body of the girl the police took a year to identify. Fullness, decline, and decomposition-- anything tethered to process or choked in its time. Salami, foreclosure, or genocide. This bird or that—the sparrow just flown from the clothesline to breed, or the solitude thrush too startled to sing? Plot #245
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The Last Pioneer
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