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How To Treat Flowers
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If the flowers are carnations: Why? Wasn't she worth roses? Wasn't there a summer bouquet with a few sprigs of baby's breath, one two roses, and maybe a Chinese orchid? You cheapskate. Why are you such a cheapskate?
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Leave the flowers on the kitchen table, in their clear plastic wrap, beside the blender. She will cut the plastic wrap with her favorite pair of white-handled scissors. Cutting plastic gives her great pleasure when it is flowers in the plastic and cutting them loose.
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You buy the flowers and she cuts the stems, runs water warm, sprinkles sugar in the water, for somewhere, if you heard her correctly, somewhere before you (you've forgotten there was a before you) another man told her to put the flowers in sugarwater.
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None of this will happen in time. C.S. Lewis swears all of time is written on a piece of paper and the paper is God. You don't believe in God, but still. If time is written on a piece of paper, all of time, if that's true, then you are simultaneously buying the flowers, taking the woman from the park bench in your mouth, and making love to your wife while she watches a stranger pee into your commode. It is, after all, your commode. Get angry.
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I notice you, noticing you, nostalgic for the time before you, which is her time not yours, which you would like for yours, which you would like to pocket along with the change from the ten dollar bill, for the flowers were only five since you bought carnations, since roses were ten, and though you had the ten dollar bill, you wanted something (Spinoza and a whole lot of other people agree: “Desire is the essence of man”), you wanted a cold malt-liquored beverage, which requires going into the bar, asking the woman biting into the orange if she will join you in the bar, isn't she hot in this heat, really, she must be.
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“We are getting stale, I called it. I can feel us getting stale and it sickens me.”
“More.”
“You sicken me.”
“I took the flowers and I cut the stems off the flowers. I cut the stems off the flowers because you wanted me to do it, you urged me toward cutting the stems off the flowers and I do not regret one bit of it, not even in the morning.”
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The problem with flowers and your buying them is implicit in the exchange of, yes, that ten dollar bill. Times you have bartered flowers for sex? Four. Times you have tried to barter flowers for sex? Ten. People in the world who believe in Time? Most. Seconds it will take for the woman biting into the orange to look up and notice your flowers? Forever or a few seconds.
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Spinoza says “One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent.” The same thing, at the same time, look up, oranges are the essence of man, biting into them is the essence of, look up, look up, the same thing at the same time the flowers the orange in this heat, really, you must be.
© 2008 Jillian Weise
© Soft Skull Press
© All Nations Press
Jillian Weise is the author of The Amputee’s Guide to Sex and Translating the Body.
Her poems have recently appeared in Forklift, Ohio and Tin House.
