Orchid Lovers

         After Verdelot, 1533

                     Mantis  

He looks to her to make a figure
who appears not to see him as he is
an old man in garden chair whose
orchids sprout leaves roiling his mind
to float her lips on air. They do not
speak, if they did, he would not hear
the indigo opening its hooded gift.
A blue creature, she will plant vanilla
mint and lemon. He will turn them
into green and yellow suns. She brings
mandibles and cinnamon. But you
never overhear the grunt that takes
you. The garden chair is overgrown
vine tomatoes fruiting at the knee

                    Kali

Let me be the logic of your Sun,
he thought she said, what light there
was buried deep within her orchis
thigh, sticky small-death stems  
for bees dozing in pollen, shot by
shuddering stamen, his ash in terra-
cotta, his heart in the sky; her root
eye in death, a rhizome womb alive

We are not mother to the world
she would always say, awakening
seasons, drowning puppies in Tibet,
her clover face, a swastika in bloom  
He thought she said, mine are not
your worm and bulb at rusty gate

                       Keiki

The garden chair is overgrown
vine tomatoes fruiting at the knee
But you never overhear the grunt
that takes you. She brings mandibles
and cinnamon. He will turn them
into green and yellow suns. A blue
creature, she will plant vanilla, mint
and lemon. They do not speak, if
they did, he would not hear the indigo
opening its hooded gift; an old man
in garden chair whose orchids sprout
leaves roiling his mind to float her lips
on air. He looks to her to make a figure
who appears not to see him as he is

*A Keiki, Hawaiian for ‘child’, is a plant asexually produced by an orchid as
clone. The insect, Orchid Mantis, imitates the flower, devours prey alive.
The Dendrobium Swastika, a hybrid orchid, Royal Horticultural Society. Verdelot:
Sì liete a grata morte: Such happy and welcome death . . .Renaissance love song.

Elegy for Abstract Copula

   { For Sophia Nugent-Siegal }

                  [there is]

Cleaved by light from abstract verb

is being made whose syllabi breathe

a girl alive in epitaph etched in space

as down the spiralling letters of your

name, like a god you step from Ought

to Is; your iambic, by noun or adverb

edging invisibly towards first thought,

a voice you strangely hear as someone

else. Perhaps, I could know your pain,

not mine, or shrink a cloud of being

into a drop of grammar, like the sharp

taste of fruit in tamarillo, a sense we

almost share in a quavering noun, as

your eye hovers just above the line  

                 [no word]

What we read we become, Borges

wrote, with a nod to YWHW, the

unpronounceable AUM, but you

more than I, know the treachery

of images whose grins appear as

easily as wooden teeth to Alice

in her looking glass, flickering

her green perception on and off.

We do not see the world in its idea.

All our intuitions are blind. I could

no more peel from a strawberry

its taste, like a membrane, than

my eye could strip from the Sun

its afterimage from flaring nuclei

                  [for love]

Of myself
                      you might have said
dawning an aspect,
                       I have no more
                       illumination than
the Sun
                       Has of knowledge         
                                          light
Yet
                    As the Evening Star
I never see

                                 Are One     
                      Invisible in you
Am   I . . . ,

as if an elegy could abstract grief.

 

 

 

 

It Must Be Abstract

For Charles Altieri, finishing on a line from Wittgenstein

From form to shape
our world is partly whole
by seeing what thought feels
to see the sun not as it simply is
but by all we desire to see it as
as if to fill a void of overwhelming light
her eye finds shapes in cloud
bright cumuli amassing figures
by sense beyond the sensible
Phoebus in his car with diamond wheel
lost among the guffaw of the crowd
as the artist might draw
from silk the colour red
and clasp her as a lover to his heart
or the poet who draws
a drop of blood from stone
are but modulations from a sound
where shifting her split skirt
her voice and dance can flatter
either verb or noun, her supple
moves borrowed from a tune
played on W’s Steinway
to yield a self, a subject vibrant
in the world of ordinary fact
like sitting in a bar next to death
crossing and uncrossing her legs
where all that is the case is true
objects arching giant spines
across space as time as we imagine it;
not as we could know a self that is
but as it is: a whole cloud of philosophy
condensed into a drop of grammar.

Maller, Gershon. “It Must Be Abstract.” The Wallace Stevens Journal, vol. 42, no. 2, 2018, p. 265. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26755476. Accessed 18 Sept. 2024.