Rhizanthella Gardner

The sensuous signs offer us a new structure
of time, time rediscovered at the heart of lost
time itself, as an image of eternity
~Deleuze

Sequestered in earth, invisible flowering
truffled to fungus in wet dark. Sniff past
the ground, see past the crack in the soil
incise with fingertips the parted dirt, to find
the threatened orchid, sessile and yawning
breath like honey

He rolls away from her and the smell of them
puffs from the sublayer of sheets, meeting places
of bodies, wet and sticky shrink back in the quiet
away from the heat, sound sinks deep into
their inner ears

These hours are torn from their timeline, her heart
from its shape, her bare hands from their image
She is speaking inside herself and each word
burns long enough to clothe his back in what
she can't contain

Slow speed of night moving into the unseen
deadline of morning like a tongue into a mouth
stroking language

Bucket Orchid

Labyrinthine flower
of courtship, and its
sodden bees, set free
after the glue has set

Looking into its throat
almost the shape of
an eye, or a hand, like
the origin of a myth

Disappointment only
opens its dirty palm
the second time round

The return visit-
she says to him 'Now I
see.' Closes her eyes

Sandal of Aphrodite Orchid

"Looking at the bag-shaped labellum
of the Paphiopedilum gave me the notion that
it had been left here by some kind of alien"
~Takashi Kijima, photographer, author of Orchids


Follow the italic slope
of his refined constellation, his
vulgar nebula, his search for
the insect-like space man

Be guided by colour
By the scarlet veins at the
throat, where it falls open
Measure all things against
the length of your thumb

and when you want to
know who's been loving

check between the fibres
of Aphrodite's doormat

Man Orchid

Be thou opened

Labellum resembling torso
and limbs, head of petals
Simplest accuracy

outside
roar of leaves and her
dog doesn't bark anymore
knowing his smell, sound
of his step

Cluster-like inflorescence
he sees their feet under
the sheet, watches the
half-buried churnings

His lust is pungent and she
can smell him through
the closed window, telepathy
of scent, layered at the mouth

soft tongued and accurate
wired into the word-roots
Orchis Anthropophora
aequitas

Neofinetias

Corruption,
to think its smell
makes the air heavy

Lizard Orchid

The flower is disguised
as a lizard diving headfirst into
itself


The hunters have travelled
ten miles inland with a hundred
thousand invisible seeds attached
to their trousers

Sometimes, believing themselves
to be set upon by an unseen enemy
they fill their clay pots with sticky
harvest, walk further into
the forest they do not know

Unseen movement becomes
sound pulled closer, sound to
the hunter an idea in alphabet

Eyes to detail in the humus
they stumble past the goatish
odour of their prey

Ghost Orchid

In 1882 the orchid hunter Roebelin awoke
to find the ladder to his tree house gone.
He lay on his back looking at flowers of lilac
and cinnamon through the hole in his roof.


Moon's ingress into Cancer
Shiva toenail against indigo
with dandruff stars

He comes back quietly to the house
He thinks he hears her eyelids open
Puts his hand on the place near his
stomach where he imagines
forgetting starts, stops
an out breath

The room is a dense garden of her
smell, soon he will have to say
something, soon she will reach
from under the blanket for his
hand

Lovers of the lovers whisper agitato
in their sleep somewhere past

Slick twinned legs of the Ghost
Orchid, still one with root and
nectar spur, tongued by moths
who won't strive to
outlive themselves