The Dahlia

To consider the dahlia, you must arrive at that age

when you no longer flinch;

Have soldiered through many winters, numb with cold,

stuck up to the hips in snow;

Have stood on the banks of the river and watched

it freeze and unfreeze, each time wondering what will return.

Not a flower for a young girl,
Not soft and delicate and dewy,
Not pale like a yellow rose or a pink,

like the flowers given
when I was pink as a rose.
The dahlia is the flower of late summer,

The flower of the pause, when, for a few weeks, time stops.
You can see it breathing in a rough mix
of sunflower, black-eyed susan,

chrysanthemum, and zinnia in rotting arbors
in ditches at the side of the road.

To consider the dahlia, you must live in a sun-drenched land,

where rain is a thing of memory.

It carries the sun in its gold-skeined petals.
It is the flower of here and now,
Of words thrown over the shoulder.

To consider the dahlia, you must feel
passion bottled up and ready to pour forth.

When you consider the dahlia, don’t expect to drop

into its magenta glow and smell a heavy perfume
or be reminded of the whiff of a young girl’s neck.

The scent of a dahlia is an imagined thing

dried and framed
like spilled blood.


Marcia Aldrich is the author of the free memoir Girl Rearing, published by W.W. Norton, and of Companion to an Untold Story, which won the AWP Award in Creative Nonfiction. She is the editor of Waveform: Twenty-First-Century Essays by Women, published by the University of Georgia Press (with teachers’ guide here), and has been the editor of the journal Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction.

… return to Issue 13.2 Table of Contents.