It is this geography that Robert Duncan refers to in one of his most celebrated poems. Though the scene appears to him at first as if it were imaginary, he makes clear that it is rather an imaginal one, one that is created inside the body, located “near the heart,” and thus real. The poem’s lines begin with the title “Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow”:

The “eternal pasture folded in all thought” of which Duncan speaks has its twin in the real meadows and gardens we walk through and the bouquets we hold in our hands. Mid-summer, the flowers, large as soup bowls, small as thimbles of blown glass, their stamens chalky with purple-black pollen caking onto the petals, are the dominant species in the world. “The notion that spirit might turn out in some sense to be matter (and plant matter, no less!) is a threat to our sense of separateness and godliness. Spiritual knowledge comes from above or within, but surely not from plants. Christians have a name for someone who believes otherwise — pagan,” writes Michael Pollan in his book The Botany of Desire.^[49] The forms of flowers are perhaps the most perfect forms because we recognize in them forces that are already inherent in us. Perhaps this is the knowledge that drew Morris Graves, after his many attempts to depict the inner world through abstractions, to paint his winter still lives and summer bouquets, and why we, in turn, are drawn to them.