Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

1. The Empire of Flora A tossing garden in a rising wind, an air of expectation. And Claire tutoring me on the landscaping: pagoda plants, crotons, a kind of blue ginger; over there, African lilies, bellwethers of spring. When she points me to liriopes, I expect the terrace to be inhabited by a feminine miniature, nymph or naiad out of ancient Greece who makes a cushy, scented bed for fauns, or Jupiter Himself. I’ve forgotten that “cerulean Liriope” is the mother of Narcissus. The Empire of Flora, Claire says, is a disquieting kaleidoscope: limbs, and hair, and faces of those that love discountenances. For—as if I needed reminding— immoderate love comes to no good. Claire is wearing a crisp white shirt. To garden? … Ah, she’s rewinding her lecture on Poussin, who could take the measure of our hurt and scale it to the distance between roiling heavens and rock terrain. Now instead of pointing out plants, she’s mapping the labyrinthine myths of that famous picture plane: Smilax sprawls on Crocus; Clytie pants after Phoebus, but what she wants to show me is the distancing of Narcissus from close-seated Echo. “Look at how desire taunts: gazing is at right angles to listening: that tells you all you need to know.” The ear at right angles to the eye. I never thought … and now the rain. White-haired Claire in her shirt (spotless; linen; almost a shroud) my new garden cedes. Palmettoes fan. We put a frame around the dirt. 2. Voluptuous Provision Ice storms shatter and varnish the South. Up North, where my mother’s housebound, snow’s furious refusal to fall wears out the wind until it lies slack on swathes of earth. Here, on a peninsula that looks, on the map, like a toe shoe pivoting on the Caribbean, orchards shiver their aromatic snow, driven by green rain and purple thunderclap (and the subtle palpations of the bees) until the ground approximates Paradise’s parody of winter. How good it smells, this orange blossom. If anything could freeze time into a crux of possibility and fruition both at once, it’s this cluster of citrus amid florets. I’ve been exiled to Paradise, it seems: all seasons are now one. Resurrection fern will grow in the groins, lichen will pattern the trunk; and where a harmless rat snake slunk, silver moss will mint itself like coins out of a magician’s thin air. Production is relentless, like the rain. Countrywide ice and snow cause pileups that slide into the next life, but this goes on and on like my mother’s television, 24/7, she dozing in its glare, the Jack Russell curled like a fox on the daybed. Oh well, when the pandemic is over, I imagine nothing will have changed very much. Her cake and cookie clippings will all have remained aspirational, gesturing toward kitchen research. And we will both have grown old. How strange that the infant that lay in her young mother’s arms can play at being contemporaries, as the cold creeps south. Voluptuous provision, keep me in your antic sight, the ground of being underfoot, fruit that mirrors back the sun. 3. Easter Mass Vaccination In the event we forget the effect of spiraling up the on-ramp to expressways above the trees where our eyes are wrecked by sunlight bearing the stamp of angelic principalities and a hallelujah chorus of so much chrome and mirror, en route to the feculent parking lot of a downmarket, dubious strip mall—where we’ll bare a shoulder (pick one) in a squat Federal Emergency Management Agency tent set up with tables, folding chairs and electric fans whose roar is likewise giving vent while we stick our printed labels over our hearts. The bar code scans, the flesh is swabbed and jabbed by Navy personnel in camo, surprise consideration in the gaze above their masks. We’re tabbed and filed in seats row by row for observation: is what this says is that strangers are still good; that when the stainless bandage falls we are the beneficiaries, less of new antibodies in the blood than the ancient protocols of principled and impersonal love?