I Could Not Believe My Eyes

In the fall of 1986 I went to my favorite New York museum, The Morgan Library, and there, in the beige gallery off the dimly lit foyer, glowed one hundred and ten flowers, all cut and pasted by the hand of a woman two hundred and eighty six years before. The gallery was so underlit that it felt like being in a room beneath the ocean. I almost swam from flower to flower, like snorkeling to discover coral glimmering in a world that exists in another element. These were only a tenth of the botanically accurate, life-size portraits of flowers created with thousands of pieces of cut paper pasted on deep black backgrounds by Mary Granville Pendarves Delany in 1772, at the age of 72.

I was thirty-nine and had published two books of poems. Those flowers had the carefully crafted but utterly mysterious emotional quality of the poems I most admired. I went around the show twice, not methodically, but flowing from frame to frame across the gallery. I could not believe my eyes. I could not get over the dexterity, the eyesight, and the fine muscle coordination that produced them.

If you want to view these miracles, go to: http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/search_the_collection_database/search_results.aspx?searchText=mary+delany