Wildflowers In Her Hair

A wildflower can grow anywhere. It’s free. It’s untamed. And therein lies the fault in its nature. In loving freely, in being reckless and giving into innocent desire- one can get hurt.

Traci Brimhall starts the poem by saying, “So much can hide in an open field”- a peculiar statement because when one thinks of a field, one thinks of an open space, and can one really hide something in the open? But it’s a statement that holds true to life, because there are many things that go unnoticed, that hide in plain sight—with the lines, “A prairie dog/ Can escape the hawk that devils it. A seed/Can wait until it us ready to be broken open,/The earth ready to transform it.” Brimhall acknowledges that these things can only remain hidden till a certain point of time- the dog will only hide until the hawk is chasing it, the seed will only remain hidden until its ready to bloom.

In Brimhall’s case, it’s the realization of a regret. Of the growing guilt in doing something that is wrong.  “Today, aphids/ ravage the wildflowers”—She is the wildflower, being ravaged. As Brimhall says, “And I am returning home from another mistake,” we can assume that the mistake that she is talking about is infidelity- and its not the first time that she’s been unfaithful- she’s been struggling with it because its felt right and, until this moment she’s managed to deny everything that felt wrong about it—“I let you assure me that desire is like a boy/ who throws rocks at a deer decaying in the river./That innocent. That brutal.” Her desire has been innocent, like the boy who is throwing rocks at the deer- he doesn’t see anything wrong in what he’s doing, or in the brutality of the act—we also get a sense of violent undertones in the relationship she has with the unnamed man, when she says, “I let you hold me down/Let you draw my blood to the surface of my skin/and call it an accident.” This too she has ignored till now. However, now she is beginning to realize what she’s been doing, and “the sky” is beginning to look “awful” and “stark” and “bare”- “How, when the clouds/ expose the sun, horses tilt their heads with pleasure.” She concludes with the powerful image of that moment when realization strikes, when her feelings are finally exposed to herself, it’s when the horses- symbolic for the ideal, the noble-are tilting their heads in pleasure.

In “Regret with Wildflowers” Brimhall beautifully captures the struggle of a woman who has been unfaithful. She focuses on the feeling of finally realizing that what the woman’s been doing until now has been wrong, and but she keeps wanting to do it anyway- and therefore denies everything that’s bad about it. She’s written a powerful poem because of the strong imagery she uses in it. It’s particularly effective on conveying the feeling that she is trying to write about because the reader can picture it clearly-but at the same time, she paints beautiful, almost pastoral images- and that amplifies the effect because their beauty is tinged with regret and sadness. This is why I felt that this poem was moving, because I could picture this woman, in the poem, emerging out of a field, with tears in her eyes. It’s an image that stayed with me long after I was done reading. 

-Smriti Bansal