Tylecodon pearsonii
This morning was one of two exceptions. Sunday morning was the other. Otherwise it has been an unbroken string, four months of mornings, of that befuddled emergence from dreams to waking life, each varied dream truncated with morning light and gravity jostling me into the mattress and The Realization. It doesn’t matter what the dream is from which I awaken, whether he is a character in it or nonexistent or irrelevant. The Realization comes each morning before I am fully awake, before reason begins to diffuse into sleep to attenuate it.
He is gone. He is gone.
I carry out my daily tasks, for the most part. I laugh. I am joyous. I am angry. I go whole days without succumbing. But there it is, a fire I must walk through each day on rising, the smoke smell to linger in my nostrils all day, sometimes so strongly that I can smell nothing else.
It is not sadness, exactly.
I think it is insanity. Weeks of not going to the desert — a trip desperately needed — because of my duty to tend to a hole in the ground. Nights of panic when I realized at midnight I had forgotten to tell that hole in the ground good night, to tell it what had happened that day. Nothing else made sense. A wind-wave of a tule flower, an inch back and forth on a five-foot stem, could make the floor fall out of my heart. I felt the existence of life on Earth had been intended to give rise to him, and now that he was gone that world should fall apart, crumble and scatter in the wind, a dessicated chrysalis outgrown and shed, discarded.
Insanity. Death is the point of life and this whole pulsing world a cauldron of it, his death no tragedy though I am stricken with it, his life a happy story though it will sadden me from this day on. I am emerging, slowly.
I still talk each day to a hole in the ground.
Two months ago I found a little plant I liked, a Tylecodon pearsonii. The clerk was hesitant. “Do you have children?” No. “A dog or cat?” A rabbit. He warned me to keep the plant away from the rabbit. It is the most toxic plant to be found in South Africa, responsible for many livestock deaths a year, and he handled it once ungloved and his lips were numb for hours, so potent were the glycosides in the sap. “If a leaf falls off this plant and a bird picks it up, you have a dead bird.”
Death glistens in the front porch sun; life buried dark and deep out back. The front porch doesn’t tempt me. I tear my leaves from off Zeke’s grave, oregano and basil and sage, each of them full of evolved poisons, phenols and terpenes, ketones, methoxylated benzenes. It is all a matter of increment, and the herbs cut through the smoke.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
Categories:
Garden
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