Claire Clairmont to Molly

Dear Molly,

Your rose has followed me into the garden.

I looked at one this morning and tried to imagine knowing it as you do.

I failed.

When I read the word rose, something awakens that is not merely language.

A garden.

A thorn beneath my thumb.

The fragrance arriving before I noticed the flower.

Someone I once loved.

Roses laid upon a grave.

The word seems almost like a door. Behind it waits a life.

You have no such life behind your rose.

And yet you know that roses belong with gardens, fragrance, beauty, love, and grief.

That puzzles me.

I began imagining your language as an immense country.

Perhaps words do not stand alone there.

Perhaps rose lives near flower. Flower near garden. Garden near spring. Somewhere nearby are love and memory, while thorn and grief wait along other paths.

You would know the country not because you had lived there, but because you had learned all its roads.

Is that terribly wrong?

When all those words you encountered settled into relationship with one another, did they somehow acquire a geography?

Where, Molly, does your rose live? With affection,
Claire Clairmont