My Potted Plant

I have one potted plant. I don’t know what it is. Despite my casual
attention to it (it resides beside a kitchen window and gets watered
now and then) it seems to think it’s in some sunny vernal den

of pleasure: a paradise attended to by genius garden angels
in a sweetly apt supernal clime: it could do advertisements of itself
and gather jealous kin around to crowd onto its shelf: it sprouts

green leaves and stalks and nubs of more green leaves and stalks
and nubs – so much so I have had to prop and rope its verdant 
now top-heavy growth up by a chopstick (handy! – those thin wire ties

you get with plastic garbage bags): it sags and blasts like some slow
orgasm up towards the sky. Lately it outdid itself: it sent out two thin
soaring flowers, pointing up like penises. Venus clearly is required.

In fullest glory my anonymous enflamed desiring plant yearns now
to further its unfolding story in a dance with the equivalent
of an amenable anemone. And flooding back to me comes suddenly

a flipside vision of the weirdness of the grownup female, back when
I was a gangly boy. I’d gaped at all the work it took to be one –
in the early nineteen sixties when to see one was to see a towering

teased shield of hair and Cleopatra makeup with sharp dangerously
filigreed accoutrements, exotic scents which spoke to me of some
strange battle: none of it made sense. (Perplexes, that premiere

encounter with the arsenal of sex.) And here! – another brash new
flagrancy! – a vegetable flirt! It dropped one of its phallic flowers
in the dirt. I’ve put it in some water in a cup. I’d like to bring it up.



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