the sun and her flowers

This chapter strikes a wholly new note. The speaker has found a happy love interest, and she spends most of the chapter singing its praises. Many of the poems are short, just a few lines. They are little lyrical outpourings that express the speaker’s exuberant feelings about being in love with a man with whom she feels compatible. As with the earlier chapters, the first, untitled, two-line poem sets the mood: “on the first day of love / you wrapped me in the word special” (155). After the pain expressed in the first two chapters and the sober exploration of the lives of immigrants in Chapter 3, these ecstatic songs of love come like a breath of fresh air. A new chapter in the speaker’s life is beginning, and she embraces it with her whole heart and soul. The pain of the past may still lurk inside her, but she is not letting it stop her from enjoying the great gift of love that has come her way. Even at the very beginning of their relationship, before they have even touched, she is “intoxicated” with how well they get along and how easily they are able to talk to each other, as she writes in the poem that begins with “you must remember it too” (156).

The speaker is aware, however, that she does not come to this relationship with a blank slate. The scars from the past can cast a shadow on even the loveliest of loves and may take some time to heal. In “forward” (157), she realizes that the coming of new love means she must make a complete break from her former relationship, and she was not quite prepared for that when encountering new love. In the poem that begins with “how do i welcome in kindness” (158), the speaker is also aware of how her negative experiences in love have shaped her, and that she must now teach herself to “accept a healthy love” instead of the more brutal and destructive kind of love that she had become used to. “my idea of love is violence,” she writes, aware that habits from the past become deeply ingrained and may be hard to change.

Later, in the poem that begins with “i am trying to not” (164), she again shows an understanding that she brings baggage from the past. She must remember that she is a wounded soul and must not act out her old traumas on her new lover; it is not his fault; he is not the man who inflicted such things on her. In this, the speaker acts like her own therapist. The speaker also has the wisdom and savvy to tell herself not to get too swept away in the joy of new love. She seeks “the middle place” (161), the title of a poem in which she acknowledges that the first flush of romantic love will wear off and the lover will no longer be seen as perfect, like a god on a pedestal. She must see him for the human being he is.

The poems that comprise the middle of the chapter, most of which address caution, rational thinking, and doubt, tend to alternate with poems that express the ecstasy of love and the sweet, irresistible connection between the lovers. In the latter, there is no doubt about their passionate physical attraction. In the poem that begins with “he makes sure to look right at me” (165), she is thrilled to the roots of her being by her partner. When he puts a finger on her skin, she writes, “i quiver with anticipation”; “he sparks enough electricity in me to power a city,” and what follows, the act of love, is “magic,” she tells him. However, in “if only we’d met when i was that willing” (168), she laments that she feels “too emotionally naked” and that her vulnerabilities make her very difficult to love. In the very next poem, she confesses her love to the ocean, but in “i say maybe this is a mistake” (170), which follows immediately, some doubts recur. However, the speaker cannot resist her lover’s charm and his kisses, and she concludes with the enigmatic thought, “even if this is a mistake it could only be right to be this wrong with you.” In “checklist” (172), she wants to make sure that her partner really is the one she wants to spend her entire life with, and she asks herself some penetrating questions—“deep at the core are our values the same—.” This rational approach then immediately gives way in the next poem to a confession of deep, transforming love. This is “the sun and her flowers,” the poem that gives the book its title. In some of the speaker’s favorite imagery, she says that just like sunflowers rise when the sun shines on them but droop when the sun goes down, her beloved’s presence and absence have the same effect on her.

The latter part of the chapter is dominated by the ocean of love with which the speaker is blessed. Questions and doubts fade away, and romance and eroticism abound. The titles of some of the poems convey the essence of it: “I love you” (174), “sex” (177), “orgasm” (187), etc. Using her now familiar nature imagery, the speaker tells the flowers “what I’d do for you / and they blossomed” (176). In the cosmic imagery she also uses quite often, she notes in the poem that begins with “the moon is responsible” (181) how the moon pulls the tides; she compares herself to the still water and her lover to the moon—that is, like the effect of the moon’s gravity on the oceans, he pulls her irresistibly toward him. Continuing in imagery of the same vein, she writes in an untitled poem consisting of only five short lines and 12 words, “we are two suns” (183).

Commitment is also a theme in this section of the chapter. In “fingers” (175), the speaker assumes that she and her partner will still be together in old age. Continuing the theme of lifelong love, in “commitment” she extends it to future incarnations. After she dies, she says, she will “find you / in every lifetime” (186), and she also thinks they have known each other in a former lifetime (“another lifetime” [188]).

In the final poem (193), which is actually a prose paragraph, she takes a step back, reflecting on the previous year, describing it as “one of the greatest and most difficult years of my life.” Among other things, she learned that “love is about giving everything. and letting it hurt.” She also realizes that everything comes together with its opposite—“pain and joy” for example—and this makes up the “balance of the universe.”