i love sunflowers - especially dying sunflowers. they’ve sprouted up and are now fading in our vegetable garden – volunteers whose seeds dropped from the bird feeders. i went out to the garden the other morning to spend a few minutes with their wilting bodies and encountered a familiar face there. it was the face of a big papier mache head that ian was making the moment i first felt koruna moving inside of me. that face has been perched on a dead tree all the days and night since, hands outstretched, and is beautifully weathered now. like the sunflowers. when i look at that tattered man amidst the chorus of dying sunflowers I think of him as the deliverer of sermons in Ginsberg’s "Sunflower Sutra".
“So I grabbed the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck
it at my side like a scepter,
and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack’s soul
too, and anyone who’ll listen,
--We’re not our skin of grime, we’re not our dread
bleak, dusty, imageless locomotive, we’re all
beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we’re blessed
by our own seed and golden hairy naked
accomplishment bodies growing into mad black
formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our
eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive
riverbank sunset Frisco hill tincan evening
sitdown vision.”
koruna just turned one on father’s day. the speed of her first year astonishes me though i reckon it feels a lifetime to her. some days i feel aged and am glad to count as kin those beautiful weathered things out in the garden.