On the last day I visited the only trillium patch I know, it was raining. Centuries after these two lads left a kiss on the lips of a trillium bloom, I sit on a bench sheltered by a silver maple tree, across a pathway beside the trilliums. Beneath my umbrella, the cadence of rain sounds like the drone of days and months and years – time marching across the graves and markers of those who came before.

The trilliums cry in the rain… or the trillium’s cry in the rain… and not much differentiation in the misery of either case.

Rain falls to match the mood – melancholy and resignation and regret that reaches back through the years. The trilliums look downtrodden, bowing their heads beneath their burdens. They’ve seen the many tales and travails of love, its tenderness and tenacity, the way it sometimes defies time and space – the way love is always worth the tears. They weep for the sheer beauty and rarity of love in a world so filled with everything but love. They weep from happiness.

You, Therefore

For Robert Philen

by Reginald Shepherd

You are like me, you will die too, but not today:   

you, incommensurate, therefore the hours shine:   

if I say to you “To you I say,” you have not been   

set to music, or broadcast live on the ghost   

radio, may never be an oil painting or

Old Master’s charcoal sketch: you are

a concordance of person, number, voice,

and place, strawberries spread through your name   

as if it were budding shrubs, how you remind me   

of some spring, the waters as cool and clear

(late rain clings to your leaves, shaken by light wind),   

which is where you occur in grassy moonlight:   

and you are a lily, an aster, white trillium

or viburnum, by all rights mine, white star   

in the meadow sky, the snow still arriving

from its earthwards journeys, here where there is   

no snow (I dreamed the snow was you,

when there was snow), you are my right,

have come to be my night (your body takes on   

the dimensions of sleep, the shape of sleep   

becomes you): and you fall from the sky

with several flowers, words spill from your mouth

in waves, your lips taste like the sea, salt-sweet (trees   

and seas have flown away, I call it

loving you): home is nowhere, therefore you,   

a kind of dwell and welcome, song after all,   

and free of any eden we can name

The trillium plays many roles in floral folklore. It follows the rule of threes – three leaves, three petals, three sepals. There’s an unconquerable primal aspect to the number three, and trilliums wield this property masterfully. While some have attributed a connection to the Catholic Holy Trinity, the trillium has also been celebrated as a symbol of bisexuality and sexual fluidity. With both male and female reproductive organs (stamen and pistil) technically the trillium flower could fairly be considered bisexual itself – but more recently it’s come to be viewed as a symbol of interconnectedness and connections beyond the strict historical boundaries societally imposed within a male/female binary prison.

The trillium offers another alternative – the idea of a love not bound by time or gender or distance. Which brings us back… centuries back… to a love that at the time dare not speak its name, on a lush lunch gathering just for two.

Two lads.

Two lads on a beautiful, ephemeral spring day – the kind of day you know will never last, so part of you wants to weep, and part of you doesn’t want to be there at all because you know it will never be like this again, and you’re certain you can’t handle the heartbreak of having sipped such loveliness only in order to never have it again, and part of you knows that to not taste of heaven won’t make hell any more bearable when he is gone, so you partake of it – the day, the spring, the lips of a lad who only just said he loved you.

Two lads… and time – a tricky trio, a throubling threesome, if you’ll indulge the wayward bending of words. Time is safely and ruinously their only witness – when the lads have grown old and forgetful, when age has erased the once-indelible grooves of memory – only time will remember them there, beside the trilliums – their laughter, their gaiety, their happiness – the way they slumped gratefully against the trunk of an oak tree, one nuzzling into the neck of the other and closing his eyes, one looking languidly into the distance, into the future, into the nodding heads of the trilliums.

Two lads – one younger, one older…

Two lads – one shorter, one taller…

Two lads – one light-haired, one dark-haired…

These two lads sat beneath an oak tree centuries ago – an oak tree that must have been in close proximity to a stream or brook or some bit of babbling water that made for easy conversation or none at all. It was so long ago that lads and oak tree are again part of the soft earth that once gave slight way beneath their collective weight on this beautiful spring day. The moss was cool and soft, and nearby a patch of trilliums was in full ephemeral bloom.

Some love survives centuries, cropping up generations later in the petals of a trillium. The tender spot of mossy ground where they once sat together, taking their lunch and laughing, resting from the high heat of the day, shifts and alters under the great bearing wall of time. Watching their ease and intimacy from a distant vantage point of modern-day existence still feels obscene – like we are intruding, even if they cannot see us, even if they are already gone.

What brings two young men to such a point? What connects one human being to another in a way that stills time? Maybe it was as simple as a shared lunch. Maybe it was as easy as the spring day. Maybe it was just that he was he, and he was he.

Who knows every single intricate step it took to reach the state in which they slip into each other’s thoughts so nimbly and easily, the seconds and minutes and hours spent learning and observing, or the specific cadence of expanding affection that led them to this late spring lunch they’re sharing with the trillium?

Love – true love – doesn’t operate or appear by design or planning, nor is it mere destiny or luck. It’s a confoundingly complex series of the smallest moments that eventually coalesce into something more – sometimes friendship, sometimes respect, sometimes basic tolerance – and sometimes, when the world decides to grant us awful humans a momentary reprieve of kindness – sometimes… love.

If you know me at all, you know I’m always gonna be that Mama Bear…

Up there in the airplane…

Putting my oxygen mask on first…

Not only because I hate the children, but because it’s the safest thing to do.

Be safe, people.

Are traffic circles on the driving test?

Because what the actual fuck, people?

We cannot blame the full moon for all of the stupidity.

(Is it still ‘National Say Something Nice Day‘? Asking for a moron.)

It’s supposedly ‘National Say Something Nice Day’ so I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.

Da fuq…