It intrigues me before I know anything about it. The skeleton flower. With a name like that, how could it not? A contradiction in terms. Flowers fill the air with the fleshy scent and abundant promise of coming fruit. Skeletons conjure up death, desiccation, dry bones. What dark enchantment might be born of yoking the two together? I think of Persephone and Hades. Another uncomfortable pairing, with its own haunting allure. Perhaps her bridal bouquet was a posy of skeleton flowers.
Before I was diagnosed with cancer, Spring sang in my body like a river of flowers. Then the river turned treacherous. After the diagnosis, I began to drown. Each chemo treatment dragged me into the underworld. Reliable, and implacable as the turn of seasons. Light had never seemed cruel before. Now its absence felled me with a violence both casual and indifferent. In the depths of winter who can console Demeter or her daughter? Salvation, I would learn, cannot be hastened. Some things only come clear after the Earth has spun around its axis an undisclosed number of times. Meanwhile the seesaw barter never ceases. This endless trade of light for dark, and dark for light, as old and inescapable as orbit.
*
Long-held beliefs betrayed me. The benevolence of the universe, the wisdom of the body—I laughed without mirth as cliches I’d clutched, imploded. It wasn’t that I no longer believed in a higher power. It’s that I no longer trusted its intentions, designs, or character. Every aspect of life, even its beauty seemed, grotesque. Not even the incandescent courage, strength, and goodness of rare people like my husband could change this fact. If you’d asked for the sum of my feelings about existence in one word, I would have said without hesitation: Disgust. No matter the nobility of the odd player, it seemed to me the game was rigged and sooner or later, merciless.
*
Skeleton flowers are arranged in loose clusters on branching stems. Five-petalled, pure white, they are punctuated by delicate bright yellow stamens and offset by intricately veined leaves, generously sized, and greener than green. They are native to only three locations in the world, the wooded, wet, mountainous regions of China, Japan, and (this last befuddles many)—Appalachia. But why the ghoulish name? Rain falling on the skeleton flower renders its petals transparent. Petals hitherto white as milk, turn clear as glass. Silken blossoms glow suddenly, stunningly crystalline, glamorous ghosts of their former selves. Morbid perhaps, but magically so. What would it mean if we too were to turn see-through in a thunderstorm? What if the opaque vault of our skin—that for so long has permitted us an inner and outer—were to shimmer clear when soaked, spilling our secrets, leaving nothing to the dark? What if all it took to reveal self to self, or to another, was to be caught in a rain shower? Would you welcome the opportunity to be disclosed in a downpour, or would it distress you to be so diaphanous?
*
Cancer empties the question of rhetoric. Turns you into a skeleton flower. Your insides, no longer just your business, are routinely on display. Your privacy invaded, your boundaries dissolved. Your rainstorms: the rattling of the MRI machine, the white whirl of the PET scan. Your new and extreme vulnerability strips you down in more ways than one. Anyone who has ever worn a hospital gown knows, this garment was not designed with a priority for the demure. In the early days of my diagnosis, I was too sick to be aghast at the indignities. I had no objection to my body being discussed and treated like an object. Because that’s what it felt like. That’s what I felt like.
*
In a well body, it is possible to be diplomatic, guarded, and delicate. These qualities turn elusive in a sick one. Acute illness is inconvenient and prone to leaking stories, spilling beans, and letting slip cats from bags. The handful of things you could once control—your appearance, the state of your home, your diet, and calendar—have spun out of your hands. When you are a wreck, keeping up appearances is no longer an option. Neither is having preferences. Preferences are a privilege the ill can ill afford. It takes energy to generate and maintain them, not to mention a strong sense of self.
That which is implicit (like our true nature) is also ambiguous. Ambiguity by definition includes plural possibility. Plural possibilities afford room for discretion. Is that a lucky eyelash in your closed fist, or a fruit fly? Is that a soul or a gaping void inside you? “Maybe, maybe not,” you might nonchalantly reply, acquiring in the same moment, an air of mystique. Generally speaking, there is more romance in suggestion than in surety. Once you are explicit, you can no longer be an enigma. Many of us think we would like to be limpid like a pool. But only because we forget that transparency feels like nakedness. And most of us are timid creatures, given to shame. We don’t realize we wish to be sheer like a stocking– not see-through like a window. It’s translucence we treasure. But with cancer you do not get to choose your degree of opacity.
I had never been so weak or felt so erasable. I had never been so exposed. Within the chaos of this condition, consternation was an aura I grew accustomed to. And yet. Miserable as I was, at some level, it didn’t matter. At that point, almost nothing did. This is the backhanded freedom of hitting rock bottom. The gain in the loss. The liberty of nothing left to lose. Was I a good person? Had I led a good life? I had no idea. Belief of any kind had been bludgeoned out of me. What remained was an appalling emptiness. The math was all wrong. The hypotheses, flawed. All efforts ultimately, in vain. Everything, either suffering or soon to be. Sometimes it all comes out in the wash. Sometimes it all just washes away, on a planet that, unconcerned, continues to pirouette around itself, and its star.
*
[Insert the sum total of my experience over the past 700 days. Its dashing and desolate Springs, its scorched and splendid summers, its fall full of resurrections and downfalls, its winter of terror, its winter of wonder. Some day I will write it all out. Right now my heart is too raw, my tongue too tender.]
*
[Insert the newborn, never-ending Now.]
*
The cellular structure of the skeleton flower leaves room for air, much as the cellular structure of a poem leaves room for interpretation. When the sky is clear and their petals dry, these tiny pockets of air play consummate ping pong with all the visible wavelengths of light, reflecting them back to our waiting eyes in roughly equal proportion. We do not see this skillful scattering. All we see— is white. Until the rains. Water has a funny way of finding pockets and filling them. The Skeleton Flower’s airy cells, when waterlogged, will no longer prolifically paddle photons back towards the beyond from whence they came. No, they now grow gracious and hospitable, waving light in, like an esteemed guest. Letting themselves be x-rayed, illuminated, beautified by barely-thereness. Skeleton flowers, pretty in the sun, dazzle in the rain. But let’s be real. The stakes for this flower are low. Unlike the Venus-Fly-Trap, skeleton flowers have no skeletons in their closets. They have nothing but their innocence to hide.
*
When it comes down to it, are we really so different, you and I? We who walk this world full of rage and regret, oblivious of our riches, insensible to our beautiful bones. Hung up on trifles. We who are, when it comes down to it, no less than a prolific emptiness in an envelope of skin, more mist than matter. Utterly unaware of the light we scatter.
Cancer can precipitate a certain kind of pellucidity. Clarity does not dabble in compunction. Only cloudiness can be conflicted. Winter is always just around the corner.
And so is Spring.
The Poetry Of 