Moth Orchid
Phalaenopsis Amabilis
Because your roots are purely metaphorical,
your feet planted crudely on packed soil,
you incline toward airy associations.
Why else compare us to that drab animal
ravaging your closets, a fool for any
naked bulb? Look at it now, its abdomen
pressed to the window, romancing
the cold moon! At least those Greeks
your botanists are so enamored of
devised a way to tell false light from true—
God in a shower of gold? He comes to you.
Mornings, in our case, when our pallid need
has stirred him out of sleep, and he climbs
hot and high through the kitchen window,
filling us lip and tendril, budding us
stalk by stalk. We understand it’s different
with your kind—hurried and in darkness—
thirsting to be known as we are known.
Think of us as a crowd of white faces
who’ve seen this and more:
watched you lie down in his bright beam
that you might be entered like that
and rise, with his heat in your hair,
dimly conceiving.