Issue 42 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

moving like her under him, so many underlings move him,
yellows, oranges, pinks, lavenders spilled here like congealed
volatile oil, wacky pie chart gone fractal
perhaps just to be popular
and on the up and up still rising, garnished with blush
of pollen that is dirty and nutmeg-colored from a rubbing
on Mr. Wonderful's fingertips before dispersal
and the impression that rubbed pollen
could be a grating of his skin for no reason at all,
and that could be why he'd do it.
The trick is to get his fingertips there; after that, there's no trick
to what's visible under the microscope: fortified spiked walls
of a labyrinth, the innermost curl somewhat a spirochete,
and saying that, it's clear just what to picture: artistry transfer
to brushes with syphilis, lues, late treatments, penicillin
success after gross disfigurement, many diseases
seem to establish blossoms on skin, leprous flowers
tended in special, colonirLl gardens.Pet vectors.
There are spikes and hooks
in the fortress of Mr. Wonderful's fingerprints, torture labyrinths,
caches of poisoned intentions unless this is taken another way:
beautiful loop of embroidery, the head of a seahorse from afar,
silk fins present though unseen.
Under the microscope some flowers have bones, there's druse
inside the cells, crystalline inclusions made of the stuff
of kidney stones, and in the flower cells
skeletal druse looks like starburst: an angular and pointed
sub-flower that gathers light.
There remains the simplicity of his selling flowers
not yet milked, still full of perfumes.
They live in marigolds. They live in cyclamen.
When customers sniff, they pray into the petals.
Some flowers are poisonous without this wonderful help:
Barbados nut, the seed of a hairy botanical thing,
at least 55 percent hell oil
and a taste that can be craved, almost sweet,
though belladonna, though the berries of lirio
so much more purple than plums - nearly black,
about to burst with coarse sugar - look sweeter
and are a source of Wonderful's ink
as are the ruddied orange sometimes berries of assumed
pure lily of the valley linked to devotion with bell flowers
each of which seems a chapel
where a corpse might lay drenched in flowers
all because the lily was thought to be wild garlic
and was souped for what turned out to be a last supper
of that soup and a salad of anesthetizing monkshood
leaves and radish-mimic roots so that the Dundee cake flavored
with the same to finish off the person finishing the meal
was not needed. Nothing was left to chance.
Fish are not stupid, that is not why they're hooked
on Wonderful's supply of flowers floating with him,
slapped occasionally with water Mr. Wonderful scoops up
until sequences of float, scoop, slap, dip, rub, disperse
blab and blurt out ritual, and the wonderful boat becomes
a church on waters of exile
where fish die with Wonderful's poison in them, white bellies
like sails no better off than the up-bellies, quite unsail-like sails
for being waterlogged inadequate islands
ideal for water bugs that don't need such refuse
to be refuge. Dead fish form plump alphabet:
a spell of Rima on the water.
Her name drifts with the bulk of fish belly