FOR HE IS AN ORCHID
It’s midwinter,
the daffodil bulbs we planted stick up like swords
“Son, come in from outside,
there’s nothing to see in my garden this time of year,”
“But Father,” I reply,
“I am imagining the garden ablaze with colour
You can’t rob me of my imagination
in my garden of projection,
where magic spells and mythic tales
conjure women washing by wishing wells,
“Wait”, Father tells me,
“.. wait until the daffodils come out next Spring.
But for now let’s go for a drive together, down by the river”
“Where are we going, Father?
I don’t recognise this stretch of river”
In the distance,
two lighthouses,
one on each bank
I know exactly where I am
I walk to where the river meets the sea
You cannot see the sea from there,
only imagine it
I pass one of the lighthouses
A poster reads: ‘THE MOST ROMANTIC LIGHTHOUSE’
I learn that it is the lighthouse in the tale The Snow Goose
A man lives alone in a lighthouse
He tends birds and nurses an injured goose
When war comes, he sails to rescue others and does not return
Years later, the goose comes back, injured again
What a kindly empath the lighthouse man is
I ask myself,
“if love is the most dangerous illusion,
can anyone have too much hope in their hands?
It’s now early April
The garden is alive with rows of daffodils
Eligible suitors wearing lime green suits,
pretty white scarves and yellow chapeaux
“Is there one daffodil you particularly want to pick?”, Father asks
“No” I reply, “for he is an orchid”
“And you are a tired looking lily”, Father says
“Put down your imagination son.
Everything will still be beautiful tomorrow”.
James Baldwin writes:
‘If I love you I must make you conscious of the things you cannot see’
Indeed, illusion and what the mind can’t see
is threaded into the bark of my family tree
For yes I am a lily
Lee, a pruned deviation of my Scottish grandmama, Lily
Together with her husband Jock the magician and Lily as his graceful assistant,
they earned notoriety in the world of disappearing acts
in the music halls on Sauchiehall Street in 1950s Glasgow
In gay Polari slang,
the police are lily law
so tell me, how do these words hang:
Lily in her bikini, Jock with his saw?
One night their act went horribly wrong,
and the audience had to confront what they did see
Lily’s legs dangling out the end of a half-sawn box
with her disembodied head looking dead as night
And her screaming husband waving his saw
“I’M A NUTTER WITH A CUTTER!”
This Easter, I’d rather not give an orchid an Easter egg
so I make the call:
“Please sir, are you a chocolatier
who can make magic and myth out of cocoa bean?”
Three weeks later,
just in time for Easter,
a box is delivered
to a South American maker of myths
He opens the box to discover inside
the head of not beast, not man
but the tension between
the mystic, the sacred
and the saccharine
Inside is the head of a minotaur
carved out of chocolate
with a note attached with:
For an orchid x
In Father’s garden, I throw a penny in
to the wishing well and watch it sink
Later, a sculptor’s words get under my skin
They sharpen my sight and make me think
And not just his words but his prosthetic hands
stitch wonderlands inside of me
Who would have thought an orchid understands
how to take the salt out of the sea?
