From Blossoms

Both the title and opening phrase, “from blossoms comes” (Line 1), present the relationship between origin and fruition in a manner that challenges initial assumptions. On the one hand, the genitive preposition “from” suggests a prior state out of which some other state comes into being, as in a sprout growing from a seed. “Blossoms,” though, typically signals the end of a plant’s life cycle, as the plant yields its seeds to the wind and soil. In other words, “from seeds” would be a more logical pairing of terms. Right at the outset, the poem is presenting beginnings and endings as fused in complicated ways.

A similar principle of living and non-living things joined together informs the pairing of organic and inorganic images throughout the stanza, such as the “brown paper bag” (Line 2) containing the peaches, or the “sign painted Peaches” (Line 5), where the speaker and reader both encounter the “Peaches” in the form of a written word. Taken as a written word, the peaches are a representation rather than a material object, something removed from its immediate source, not unlike a memory. The stanza also introduces another central theme that serves to unify its opposed senses of loss and joie de vivre or celebration of life: the theme of travel, transit, or movement, visible here in the “bend in the road where we turned toward / signs” (Lines 4-5).