Flowers

The day we'd first come to look at the house, it was April.  The magnolia trees were in full bloom out in the back yards, making Bed-Stuy seem, from the view of this old, run-down house, like some kind of paradise.

What is missing from that account, of course, is that it was just warm enough outside that we wouldn't have noticed that the house's poorly built extension -- the ground floor kitchen -- would later get so cold in the winters that the pipes could freeze even when the heat was on.  Had it been raining, we would have also seen that there might have been a puddle on the floor in that room. 

We would find all of that out later.

Missing from the story, as well, was the seemingly ominous fact that Steven and I had arrived separately to view the place.

Missing from that story is the fact that our schedules did not permit a simultaneous visit.  (Was that an omen too, though, or was it merely a fact of contemporary life?)

Missing from the story was the fact that we would buy the house together but start living apart just four short years later.

But none of this is what I'd wanted to say -- isn't true to the spirit of what I'm feeling -- that even on this chilly, rainy day in May, as I sit, staring out the window of the parlor floor I'd always hoped to live in (instead of renting out to strangers for my survival), I am looking out over the canopy of a flowering tree whose petals and branches are deliciously slick with rain water.

I am a poet who does not know the names of flowers.  I cannot define, with any specificity, what a crocus is.  I can tell you exactly what layaway means -- and tenement and stoop and flashing and grout and joint compound and pigeon -- but not finch or foxglove.  Not really anyway.

But I can also tell you that in Spanish, the word for pigeon is the same word that's used for dove. And I can tell you that Paloma is also the name of Picasso's daughter.

But Google will not tell me the name of the beautiful tree outside this window that is currently making my day.  No, the magnolia trees magnificently came and went in April; this is a different tree, a different flower -- a pink less pale and surrounded by an abundance of clusters of these small oval leaves that are slightly pointed at the end. After searching the web for an hour, I can tell you that what is missing from the internet is the identity of this flower with its darker fuzzy underside, its symmetry like a small set of lungs, from between which sprouts a small bulbous bulge reminiscent of some object of a study by  Georgia O'Keefe.

No, I can say that whatever tree this is that blooms every spring -- in sync with the bush of tiny, white clusters of lace-like snowmound spirea flowers below it (thank you, Google) -- is not a magnolia tree.  These newer pink flowers come to my rescue each spring, blooming just as the pink and red and orange and yellow tulips that Steven had planted (his pragmatic way of giving me flowers, he had told me) are beginning to close up and fade and die.

I can tell you that it is supposed to rain every day this week.  But I can also tell you that in April the muddy, winter-ravaged back yards of Bed-Stuy bloom into clouds of pale pink magnolias, and the tulips below me open in orange and yellow and red flames, which die out to be replaced by these darker, unnamable pink blooms and snowy white ones.  I can say that soon will come, accompanying an unbearable sun, the bloom of hydrangea -- first green, then white, then purple, then blue -- beneath where the tiny white clusters will have since died, along with the vines of purple morning glories that reach across the yard every relentless New York summer.  I can say that the brown leaves will then fall, followed by the snow.

And I can tell you that all of this will be both preceded and followed by this green glow of rain.