06.02.04| in the backyard the gardenias finally open

“All culture, all civilization is an artful web, a human puzzle, a colorful quilt patched together to lay over raw indifferent nature.”
      —Spaulding Gray, Sex and Death to the Age 14

In the backyard the gardenia bushes finally open their huge white mouths along with a halo of new leaves. A surprise of sorts—although the winter seemed mild for me, the plants reacted with extreme emotion near the end of February, shedding leaves, turning brittle. However, the last three thunderstorms provided the right amount of downpours to satisfy growth: an explosion of leaves and buds.

Second paragraph. Second surprise. The scent of the blossoms. I always forget the strength of the fragrance and the sudden emergence of memory—a haunting from the past whenever I lean close to the flowers.

Maybe transportation is a better word. A movement into the past to Port Neches, Texas into my grandmother’s garden, where everything seemed to move out of sync with the real world. The summer I turned four. A humid day in particular. Bright sunlight. Mid-June. Dark green shadows surround me as I kneel in pine straw, under the skirts of a large gardenia. Myself a child lost in itself. Lost in the act of being a child. Hiding in the folds and patterns of a thick forest. Crouched down into the zen of the moment.

In one sense, I should not be surprised by the flooding over by the scene. In itself, this vignette remains the crux for most of my current work—the male figure crouched down in self reflection, in the act of either becoming or un-becoming an entity of pure thought.

And in reality, the memory is in itself a gathering of many sperate memories pieced together into one, a collection of similar instances when as a child I would hide, just to have a few moments alone, away from the clutter of living, a wanting to find out more about myself, discover the language of identity.

It remains difficult to fully translate the situation to words. Thirty-odd years later I can only now trace back to the desire itself, as it opened itself to me, represented in the form of the humid scent of gardenias unfolding in the afternoon sun.