II.     Was there ever a time that I bothered to try to stay dry? 

 

In my previous incarnation I didn’t mind the flagellum made of peacock feathers, held over my head during cavalcades.  You see, I had yet to be humbled.  In New York, buoyed by the blowsy vapors of young love, I carried a lacquered paper one on a balsa handle, spring green painted with white violets, but only to cut a romantic figure, a small-breasted lusted-after girl flouncing off to the secretarial pool.  Wetness was a way of life, upping the saturation of my little white blouses and beading my eyelashes with prisms.  Translucency served my purposes, which were transparent as glass shoes.  “Who’s the queen now?”  He said it in a lilting manner, the man wearing bright yellow rain gear.  I hate foreshadowing. 

 

III.  The umbrella was the hub,

 

and the hub of the umbrella was the pole around which the cleats and skeleton ribs spun.  From the hub arose many begettings.  The peony was begotten, the woody stem echoing the umbrella pole, topped by the beguiling trivialities of petals, and the peony begat the Heartland Peony Society, which begat culture.  Culture begat the faux peony, the petals sometimes made of silk, the stem, a hub of cold wire wrapped in green tape, which begat capitalism, which in turn begat tilt-o-whirls, tennis skirts and fireworks, all things that spin and flare for no reason other than the fact that spinning and flaring greases the machine, which begat the idea for a solar system—bodies circling the hubs of other bodies—which begat weather, and Christmas, which begat shopping, and denial—thus, our decision to believe that the ants crawling over the unbloomed heads of peonies were somehow rehabilitative.  The lie begat love begat sex begat rabbits that lurked beneath the protective leaves of wild mandrake during rainstorms which begat the maypole, a hub with ribbons, and girls.  Ma and Pa called things by their real names.  Peony, they said, the word that begat us.  We begat the euphemism.  God, we said, looking at the umbrella impaled dead center in the lamb barn.