While we are declaiming the flowers who either 1) cannot be found in the Northwest Woods, 2) whose names we do not know, or 3) whose names we do know but our organizational skills are such that we have lost specific count, we must surely include the Western Skunk Cabbage, Lysichiton americanus.
But is it a flower? How can something that smells so foul it virtually melts the snow around it and, further, is used as a laxative by bears (we are reporting Scientific Facts) truly be regarded as a... flower? And if so, do we not have to revise every single bias we might have had heretofore about the delicacy of flowers?
Earth laughs in flowers, Emerson said, but if we must include Skunk Cabbage as an example, it surely must sound quite like that of a six-year-old cracking up at bathroom humor.
Which, now that we think about it, would be a fine guffaw.
1 comment:
When
the Buddha
achieved enlightenment
under the bodhi tree,
he laughed.
Thich Thien-A
(And when the universe dreamt up the arum italicum, it guffawed like a six year-old.)
best
Post a Comment