The glass vase distorts the stems with its clear knobs that twist as if flowers themselves, with its ribbed band that cinches its center like the interlocking legs of lovers in a painting. One foot stands on another; a calf bisects a calf. The line work that connects one to itself unsure and then vanishing. But this is a painting of flowers not lovers. You understand. The verdant stems twist like the muscles of a retracted wing and burst up. The silver-green lamb’s ear droops with baby’s breath, the light blue that leads to the orange mum, whose petals have stretched their furthest and are now brittle and ready to fall from the flower’s concealed head—they do not fall, though they are ready. Nearby, the tightened peony like a puckering pink cabbage. It refuses to bloom. This is misleading. It has bloomed and it will bloom. The peony is empty of all but its intricately folded self. It asks for a hand to peel back its exterior petals, to let it breathe. But paintings do not speak. And neither do flowers. A thought is here, but I can’t tell what it is. I can see the cockscomb, the flower that believes itself a human brain, hiding in the foliage of the impossible bouquet. In the painter’s mind, the blooming from different seasons, the arrangement first sweet and then rancid. The calculated balance. What has never touched touches; a carnation like a shriveled scrotum for the white hand of a lily. How the artist has exaggerated: each petal elongated, twisted like jointed fingers, and the faint stem like an exhausted wrist. There is much the eye has not seen but knows. The golden trumpets of daffodils heralding neither sleep nor death but their absence. In a painting, life does not progress to death. But the eye sees it in the vague arc a leaf takes. Like how, in the dark, the dark moves; a hand thrusts forward and dissipates, a face scurries from the ceiling to the wall where the eye loses track. And is it not strange, in the painting, the dark background that hulks over the bouquet? The insects that spill from it? Their translucent wings solid only at the joints of their thoraces. The dark contrasts the bright bursts. The dark almost swallows the bouquet, but the orange crocus burns inside the bouquet forever. It holds the dark, and the dark seeps, where it can, into the leaves. It nests. It has already nested. In the corner, a flower so purple it is almost black. A bat dahlia. Reminder of what lurks, what waits for the ripening to slow and turn to rot. It drinks the rot with its furred muzzle. But this, too, is misleading. In a painting, nothing waits, just the momentary pause when the eye moves from one area to another: the wilting heliotrope like white vomit from a green mouth, the daisy dwarfed by the red tulip, whose bloom is marbled like a mollusk shell. The insects swarm, eager to take the nectar, the juice that comes from the dead, that the gods drink to save themselves from death. The insects steal it away and give it back. One flower to the next like sex. Like sex because there is no sex without death or if there is, it is a pounding and acrid affair. The pansies’ trembling little embers fade and rekindle at the edge of the dark as they have done and still do. And above it all, a Japanese chrysanthemum unfolds. Its petals’ backsides are white, but inside is bright red, so this opening looks painful, like the fresh curls of skin pulled from chapped lips or the crotch dry-rubbed in the dark. The body bound to the chrysanthemum. Each petal like a tooth ripping long strips of flesh from another, from itself—this constant flaying, the rush of oxygen across the blood-gorged membrane, the dark heaving in the background, the seasons folding over each other until beginning and end touch like the retracted petals of a morning glory in the afternoon.