The Menage

Up stand six yellow jonquils in a glass/ the stems dark green, paling as they descend into the water/ seen through a thicket of baby’s breath, “a tall herb bearing numerous small, fragrant white flowers.” I have seen snow-drops larger. I bent my face down. To my delight they were convoluted like a rose. They had no smell, their white the grain of Biblical dust, which like the orchid itself is as common as hayseed. Their stems were thin and woody but as tightly compacted as a tree trunk, greenish rubbings showing in spots through the brown; wiry, forked twigs so close, they made an impassable bush which from a distance looked like mist. I could barely escape from that wood of particulars ... the jonquils whose air within was irradiated topaz, silent as in an ear, the stems leaning lightly against the glass, trisecting its inner circle in the water, crossed like reverent hands (ah, the imagination! Benedicite. Enter monks. Oops, sorry! Trespassing on Japanese space. Exit monks and all their lore from grace). I was moved by all this and murmured to my eyes, “Oh, Master!” and became engrossed again in that wood of particulars until I found myself out of character, singing “Tell me why you’ve settled here.” “Because my element is near.” and reflecting, “The eye of man cares. Yes!” But a familiar voice broke into the wood, a shade of mockery in it, and in her smile a fore-knowledge of something playful, something forbidden, something make-believe something saucy, something delicious about to pull me off guard: “Do you want to be my Cupid-o?” In fairness to her it must be said that her freckles are always friendly and that the anticipation of a prank makes them radiate across her face the way dandelions sprout in a field after a summer shower. “What makes you so fresh, my Wife of Bath? What makes you so silly, o bright hen?” “That’s for you to find out, old shoe, old shoe. That’s for you to find out if you can.” “Oh yeah!” (a mock chase and capture). “Commit her into jonquil’s custody. She’ll see a phallus in the pistil. Let her work it off there.” But I was now myself under this stringent force which ended, as real pastorals in time must, in bed, with the great eye of man, rolling.