The pairing of a plant with human feeling of loss, “in order to connect pieces in yourself or in a person you are trying to be with,” whether that person is disconnected from you through death or distance or some other kind of estrangement, is an ancient pairing that Herbals are based on, the connection that we might call “healing” or making whole. One can encounter this pairing in hundreds of poems, as if in merely saying the name of a flower, its healing properties might be enacted. John Felstiner, in an essay about Paul Celan, published in Parthenon West, speaks of one form of the classical Romanian folk song called the doîna, wherein despair is paired with the name of a plant. In this folk song, which is sung while expressing real grief in tears, the first words are always foaie verde, literally “green leaf”:

Like the old-fashioned herbals, which seek to pair the virtues of a particular plant with an illness, in this form the singing of the plant name serves to provide consolation to the person who is suffering, as if the language itself awakened the spirit of the form it refers to. Felstiner calls it a “folk elegy.” Here is Celan’s version of it:

As a boy in pre-occupation Romania, Felstiner writes, Celan kept a notebook wherein he recorded all the names of the flowers surrounding his village, until the hills and forests were barred to the Jews. “An acute awareness, a reach and touch for naming the natural world, would later help him offer the history of a world turning unnatural, intolerable,”^[29] writes Felstiner, a world that would kill his parents in the concentration camps of World War II and that would ultimately lead him to suicide.

The image of the flower, it seems, mediates: between lovers, between the sick and the healthy, between the dead and the alive, and for the human body.

Fifty thousand years ago, even the Neanderthals buried their dead with flowers. We know this, says Russell, because traces of pollen were left behind, “ancient versions of blue hyacinth, yellow groundsel, knapweed, and yarrow.”^[30] An artist friend, who first told me about Mondrian’s late flower paintings, found herself painting a series of what she called “sad flower paintings” after her mother died from breast cancer. A poet tells me that, in her daily meditations, she often visits her dead parents as plants and flowers. Her mother is a peace lily. Her father is a pussy willow. Because they have taken the image of plants, she can go to them in a less fraught way than in their human form. She can sit close; she can attend to them. The image of the flower, it seems, mediates: between lovers, between the sick and the healthy, between the dead and the alive, and for the human body.

The Korean poet, Ko Un, in the preface to his book of poems entitled Flowers of a Moment, writes of the flowers laid on graves: “I am convinced this heart-offering of flowers is the essence of poetry. Long before [poetry], people prayed with poetic hearts for their dead to be reborn in another world, a world of flowers, flowers representing the sorrow arising between presence and absence.”^[31] These “word-flowers” are the flowers of a moment in his title, an image for feeling that arises from the hearts of the grieving, and words, he says, that arise in his dreams:

In this poem, we, as readers, don’t know if the speaker is going down into sleep or down a mountain, whether the flower has died or been lost, picked, or forgotten, and yet in these few words we feel the loss of all things disappeared on our return over familiar terrain, an edge that seems able to straddle both memory and forgetfulness. Here, the ephemeral and eternal nature of flower or person floats, neither real nor ideal but transcending both, Mallarmé’s “flower which is absent from all bouquets.”

Ko Un states that the poems in his book “arose” from the shadows of sleep the way colors arise from night at dawn, almost imperceptibly. He says, “My brief poems have their roots in my dreams.”^[34] Thus, they are inexplicable. They drift like flowers drift over the surface of the real world, in between sleeping and waking. The question that begins this poem — is it rhetorical? We know that flowers sometimes are alone. We have found them, a stalk of lupine or larkspur, though more often than not, they grow in clusters or patches. But over there, in the dry river bed is someone else; we don’t know if it is another flower or a person or a snake. The poem has turned to face us; it suddenly addresses a you. Whatever is in the dry riverbed — we assume a flower — might be our love. Does he mean that the flower might be someone we love, perhaps someone who has died, or is our love, our capacity for love, emblemized in this flower? Or is the you a flower he is addressing? The poem doesn’t answer. The image is there and more-than-there, a cipher, meeting place and edge of an opening world. What do we make of it? We halt at this edge between abstraction and representation. We must go further, up to the edge and past it. Who is our love? Who is the flower?