What Is Myth Series

Blog Sunday Poetries by Maggie Macary

dailyArrows

Saturday, April 09, 2005

Sunday Poetry: Ghost Flowers

I.
An unborn flower grows.
Elusive, the unborn flower

II.
From root alone it winds
round and round
and round, a
blossom without leaves
surely, life's secret partner hides here
on the trees of the Fakahatchee
a secret that lives everywhere
between selves, same as the secret life
haunting Beauty hung upon a crux,
it's the same ancient gnosis
souling cities.


O how the rare, wet life silvers here
skinning again these
surfaces of watertrees, it
flowers from nothing, shedding
sepaled and petaled similars,
the white lips lobe in tapers
rooted in chaos. Their recurvings
share doubling dissimilars; both are so
and both mark the flower. It grows elusive
while self-reflecting. Sing now, Muse! Yield
again that likeness such silence reveals.
As if each must rhyme here
the unborn flower it ghosts.

Our eyes hunt such beauty
they
scour language for it.
But, the ghost orchid lives
wordless and rare
in a poetry elusive, poetry
only a rare heart hears
and, in the sea-ing,
begins to imitate.

Surely, the ghost orchid watersings
like the singers of old.
More than itself, it expresses
more than just being, in being its being or
exactly nothing by
not leafing, in its leaving something.
In appearances it ghosts and
in disappearances what ghosts
leaves life ever more alive.

A
haunting rareness this flower
so rare its praisesong sings
a deep well of well-being,
the wellness swells its possibilities
in ghostings throughout the wetlands.
What eye then hunts and ever hears these glades
drugged in its dull life though alive in its shades
though deplete of mist-tree and marsh, and living
so without, what still risks these pathless waters in?
Surely, something more heroic will risk this
this...findless find, this unborn flower.

Truly, what lives and flowers between
lives a femininity well worth the eye's risk;
risking again all of certainty, this scene lives
dying out of life like the leafless stalk.
And so, the
eye dies for that one glance, revealing
in bareness
a bath of presences as is. While as is is as
the flowering that haunts these waters
while as is silently winds the pond apple
in round after round of curvatures elusive
of all save root, till the ghost flowers
sudden and speechless pronouncings
with its white lips, while resurrection
dwells wordless and adheres.

III.
Soulings and gods, each timeless and each
themselves a feast arise readied for feasting;
the banquet of gods sets forth here the wisdom
of the grand imaginary afloat; these
ghostings are not merely my nor mine.

Muse, how shall my small ways take up
the account knowing this eternal gift in its
leaving leaves always without purpose its
giving? Its living is that living symbol in
whose dying nothing undoes. The leafless,
the rare, the naked vision nonetheless
gifts something and becomes the remnant face
ghost banqueters have always left behind.
Without leaves, this flowering is free,
free of my purposeful tastings I-ing the uses of
an/other used to tantalize a world
stuck in the guilt of apple...while such artistry
obscures the mist-tree white lips in leaves.

IV.
Elusive, an unborn flower ghosts
the bark of a pond apple. Its sole stalk
broods over water a secret life; made from
one that persists both with and without
green appearances, and one perennial
beyond all absences, and one whose
secrecy winds round and round and round
a watersong rooted in chaos.

V.
Wherever such a secret life persists
an unborn flower grows.

Stephanie Pope 2004 - Like a Woman Falling