the bees hover in the garden like fermatas, and the peablossoms cup and
clench, like the tiniest newborn fists. it is all peas, it has always been
peas. they are lined in rows, in planting boxes, in mildewed greenhouses
and he moves among them with a pair of handshears and a straw hat.
it is spring and they come up in strangled, adolescent groups, their petals
tongues searching skyward for snowflakes. the peas huddle in their
pods, hanging and snooping among the thin, delicately outheld leaves.
he counts them very carefully, and segregates them and the purple flowers
sigh after the white ones across the path, and the red peablossoms tipping
up in their strands and infirmaries are like thermometers in the mouths of the sick.
these plants are his children, the bees his governesses, and at noon the churchbell rings,
lolls, reveals its underskirt on the upswing for lunch. he tallies them, pinches them,
prods around inside of their tiny, puckered mouths, with all the concern
and worry of a father.
they are raised in a monastery, mute, unable to completely stifle their
exuberance and their vanity, chaste and breathing in their own pollen
like a familiar, half-remembered perfume. they crane their necks, and propagate
and the peapods snap open – inside, the peas cloistered and sticking together,
like husbandless mothers in a convent. he scolds them with numbers,
narrows them down to letters in a foursquare and sometimes only seems to care
about where they came from, their lineage, their royal, floral
heritage.
but when he holds them between his fingers and smiles softly in the haze
of summer and loose-drifting pollen, they know he loves them and
they blush for him.
