On the Scent

Sylvia Legris
Garden Physic

My Dear Love,

How to write about flowers without the nauseating sentimental phraseology? No quaint, no dainty, no winsome. This smells good, that smells bad, my hands rank with manure. This at least is pure.

–V.

From the sequence “Floral Correspondences” — an imagined correspondence between Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson.

I find myself chaffing at the punctuation of the penultimate sentence. I want the hands rank with manure to stand by themselves, out of the calculus of good or bad. This pure.

And so for day 3033
01.04.2015

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