“Among the graffiti one illuminated name: yours”
– Basho
Poised in beauty at the woozy edge
of this drunken swamp,
a mile deep into woods
like an enchanted pilgrim silently
climbing the ambrosial pathway
to heaven’s gate,
you startle me
with your earnest meditation,
oh sweet Buddhist orchid,
oh soft demented flora,
oh silent saint of contemplation,
oh sweet honey flower
of woodland mystery. I come upon you
growing here in this heap
of leaves and rotting humus
like a floral spit of liquid sculpture
rising elegantly
from the omphalos of dirt.
You remind me of my wife
as she ascended the stairway
of her youth
into the bridal registry
of her womanhood,
a stem of buds awakening her,
some painted white and purple,
a cough of feathers inside her,
a vase of flowers.
You remind me
of myself as I have risen
lonesome and flummoxed
in the drunkenness of my evenings,
worry and woe twisted
tight around my temples
as if I am still the bewildered groom
approaching my lover
with vanishing at my core,
something panicked and hopeful
inside my belly,
a graft of flying birds.
You remind me
of an altar of sylphs,
colorful spirits of the air
promising not security, not seduction,
nothing at all except for
being, expanding…
And erupting
from your saint stem,
three pink-and-white
orchid birds – I see them –
freeing themselves
in lopsided
emancipated flight,
as if enflaming themselves
up through the squalid air
in majesty, from the woven collar
of each sunburst axil,
each cradle of becoming,
as if the body, ours,
emaciated
like an orchid stem
with hunger, with vanishing,
could actually
bloom and exhale
winged beings,
three-bird orchids –
me you and us
from the aroused
unfolding of its
reaching,
right here at the edge of a swamp
in the woods,
just because.
Ken is a poet and psychotherapist and a 2013 Kresge Arts Literary Fellow, a Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of several books of poetry, the most recent being Scrap Metal Mantra Poems: (Main Street Rag Press, 2013). He has been published in magazines such as Rattle, San Pedro River Review, Common Ground, Cream City Review and Boxcar Review.
