The Sex Life
of Flowers
That Bloom
Solely After
Dark

“There is nothing you can see

 that is not a flower; there is

 nothing you can think that isn’t the moon”

                                              ~Basho

i

Lost, without money,

night coming on,

I look for you

in the rain.

Finding my way 

to a hotel lobby,

there’s a call for me.

My heart quickens.

Could it really be you?

How would you find me?

How could anyone

know where I was?

I pick up the phone
surprised to hear

a pre-recorded message.
Heart stricken, tearful,

and damp thru and thru,
I re-cradle the receiver.

I ask a smiling woman 

with a dachshund 

on a leash,

“Are you an angel?”

ii

To dream

is to have

intercourse

with a flower.

It’s exacting;

an artful 

insemination,

a transfer 

of pollen

via the stamen

to the carpel,

an indelicate

fertilization

between

heart and mind.

Dreams

make 
us all

female.

I live 

half my life 

in a state

of abject

fecundity.

In this half-life

all things are 

possible.

Why take

such a thing
for granted?

Dreams 

with their
inside 
information,

both symptomatic 

and significant
cause me 
to ask
how

I can be

their only
vector?

ii

Each night

I experience

an involuntary

flowering

of my being, 

yet each 

resultant 
poem

is barely
an adverb

of emotion
in an 
amber
vase.

What better 

vehicle

for the illogical

when logic

threatens to 

make us ill?

So here I am
contemplating

the sex life

of flowers

that bloom

solely after

dark.

At night,

inside the

dream

we are

our own

light source.
It's here
I can

approach 

God

through 

the coitus

between

dark and 

day.

I am
my own
terrarium.

Why would

I settle

for a

hand-

me-

down 

God

merely
to lay 

my seeds

at the feet 

of a stone

sentence

whose nouns

are unknowable?

Instead,
I have 

cultivated a

first-hand 

knowledge

from the
botany
of a
broken 
heart. 

And so

I buzz 

about

in search

of sacred

pollen,

like a

church

busybody

syphoning

off 

gossip 
about

the gardener's

love life.

My prayers

know no

shame

nor are they

disbelieving,

as my mind

only knows

how to
bloom

and is

un-adept 

in any
other
courtship.

My dreams 

are incorruptible,

fanning out

from center

to circumference

like a wilder
version of

Lady Windermere’s

fan,

their delicate

fragrance

devised to 

encourage
only
random 
petals
of recall.

My dreams

occur 

un-beckoned;

a reckoning

from the

other side.

They sprout 

mysteriously,

uncontrived, 

mandala-like

patterns,

both holy 

and wholly

on their 

terms,

bearing gifts

extricated for

well being

like a compress

for drawing

toxins.

Because I 

am alive

and 

subject to shadows,

I meet

divinities

face to face 

behind the
sheltered
perimeter
of sleep's

veiled mirror.

Night is 
a soil
and

if God

is a planter

of dreams,

then

sleep is a

garden.

Who can say

which humus

is more real?

The one I 

build upon
by day,

or the one

that decomposes

by night,

floating

my fears

upward
like a 
lotus?

Peter Valentyne

May 2nd, 2019