A little over a year ago I first encountered a poem by Marie Howe, “Annunciation.”
Even if I don’t see it again—nor ever feel it
I know it is—and that if once it hailed me
it ever does—And so it is myself I want to turn in that direction
not as toward a place, but it was a tilting
within myself,as one turns a mirror to flash the light to where
it isn’t—I was blinded like that—and swam
in what shone at meonly able to endure it by being no one and so
specifically myself I thought I’d die
from being loved like that.
Before blooming, when the flowers are just beginning to bud, young sunflowers track the movement of the sun. The plant heads—sap-green, spiky, lion-maned— tilt toward the sun at dawn, following its path across the sky, reorienting eastward at night to prepare for the sun’s arrival the next day. As the sunflower gradually opens, revealing its tightly furled petals, the flower head continues to track across the sky, receiving the light and warmth of the sun, until it has completely bloomed, displaying that familiar fanfare of yellow petals. Fully opened sunflowers do not move but face east, positioned to receive the first hours of morning sunlight, which also helps to attract pollinators, like hummingbirds and native bees.
The sunflower, Helianthus spp., turns not with its whole body but with its stem, growth hormones increasing on either side of the flower head in response to sun exposure. This means that as the plant grows taller it is the growth itself that makes it change direction. Like eyes scanning a page, it moves back and forth, its shaggy head following the sun, which it knows without knowing to follow.
I have always wondered about this—about how beings without words know what they know. How the budding sunflower follows the sun; how the monarch knows to fly south in winter, how the bower bird knows to build his home out of twigs and brightly colored things.
I have always wanted to know something like that.
Before language, before speech.
I cannot remember now where I first encountered this Marie Howe poem, which is from her book The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, but I’ve thought about it ever since. I have read it aloud, to loved ones, and at parties; I have an image of it saved on my phone. What initially struck me was the quicksilver turn of the em-dashes in the first stanza, which to me act as both a formal blank—a stand-in for the ineffable it that is never named—and as punctuation, moments where the language of the poem whips faster than thought itself. Now, though, I’m thinking about how the poem turns on an initial negation. Even if I don’t see it again—
I wrote in my last letter of always wanting to hold on to what’s already passed, which I think is also a desire for proof—to know that I am loved, that I am held, that I am called. How stark the scenario that Howe proposes—to never feel it again, to never see it, and yet, somehow, to believe it still exists. Each time I read this poem I am moved by the unquestionably holy verb of hailed, and the enjambment that follows, the sweetly pitched assurance of it ever does—, which seems to cut directly against my need for proof.
If I am called once, let me always be called—
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