The Telegraph Plant
At dawn you raise
small lateral leaflets to move along an elliptical path
hinged at the stem base.
One botanist says
your prestidigitation keeps reconnoitering sunlight’s rapidly
changing maze
so that forays
by that broadest, most ponderous central solar panel into
bright summer days
don’t go to waste.
Or do you alter the turgor in leaf-joints to twirl to deter
cattle, to escape
being grazed?
An alternative conjecture is that you mimic butterfly wings
so that she lays
eggs elsewhere, away
from a strutting rival’s circle of influence. The old myth was
that sound waves
provoke you to sway,
that you have an innate impulse to dance to delicious music,
for which your taste
is “art for art’s sake”
or pure revelry in melody, or tactile eroticism of vibration.
A recorder plays
medieval lays,
grand concertos, jazz, heavy metal, and your arousal seems
somewhat the same.
You are unfazed
by our irritable reaching after fact and reason, our nervous
hunger to make
mere wood ache
with wind’s tremor or tingling of catgut into harmony.
You’ve no malaise
to keep you awake
on a rainforest’s starry or tumultuous night. Protected from
flashlights’ rude gaze
your leaflets stay
perfectly still, drooped and close-pressed when a poem is read
near your dwelling place
to serenade
you into scotophilia. No response. You are no maudlin maid.
Come daybreak
you again raise
small lateral leaflets to move along an elliptical path
not to convey
as your common name
suggests, messages in semaphore, just to calibrate spacetime
at your own pace.
LUCIE CHOU is an ecopoet hiking and gardening in mainland China. Read more.