"Because the orchid is the queen
of flowers," I went to her house to give her
some other more common, which is to say
cheaper, flowers, and as sometimes
happens when entering another’s
house with one’s arms full of flowers,
one bloom led to another, the vermillion
thought of those asters led to the blue
faces of the violet that so needs to be
repotted, and finally there we were
were, gathering ourselves around
the orchid, for selving sometimes happens
in the pollinating of orchids, the seeds
like a cloud of tiny specks of dust, born
of the pollen of another flower of the same
plant or species, called the "x self"
its great green leaves, the soft ears
of some animal, but vegetable, unearing,
all those stoma breathing in the epidermis, like
pores within our skin, our tongues so muted
and wounding and that stalk which was so slowly
unravelling itself into the light, over which
she said she lived in fear, of the racuous
rampages of the dog, or the children crashing
to the floor with their fists, not to mention
the cold front changing the light at all
windows, hope and fear, so hinged upon
that blooming, what were we saying
and not saying? for the orchid only appears
to be complicated, bearing no more than three
outer whorls, three inner sepals, she did not
seem to know what I meant, opening out
of those buds like tiny fists or nodes of darker color
knotted along the stipe, I did not seem to know
what she meant, opening to their radiant
labellum, a column like a translucent finger,
and yet at moments, the tongue choking upon
its pebbles, swallowing its capital, tasting
its own blood, did not seem to matter, what it could not
say among those terrestrial orchids, so luminous,
growing in meadows, in fields, and even upon the surface of stones