my first encounter with the fourth dimension

hydrangeas.

the greek is hydor and angeion.
water, and vessel.

they named the plant
not for the flower
but for the small dry capsule
that holds what comes next.

“they bloom on old wood.”

that is the gardener's phrase,
and it means the flower in front of you
was decided last august,
in a season already closed.

so the blue that opened
the summer she died
had been written the summer before,

by a plant standing in a yard
where she was still alive
and unremarkable and busy.

nobody had moved it.

nobody had touched the ground.

nothing had been done to it at all,
which is the only condition
under which you can watch time work,

underneath the whole arrangement,
while we were all indoors.

that was the first time i understood
that time is not a thing that passes.

it is a thing that acts,
slowly, without hands,

on everything left standing in it.

how can a thing be identified
by its future?

how was the blue already inside
the summer before it,
folded, sealed, waiting
for the only dimension
in which it could open?

the blue came up in june.

she was gone by the end of it.

the flower did not know this.

the flower kept delivering
a message composed
by a year that still had her in it.