Moonflower’s Ghost
Summer’s vine is a knot of limbs & husks.
Wind-rattled, dry pods cling to stems.
They seem dead, but they only pretend to be.
I’m like a spy onto a code when I crack the secrets
inside: freed from crooked shells, nodes of ivory drop
into my palm, small, beveled promises of flowers,
little troves of beauty that I stow away all winter. To coax
a root, I nick the casings, wrap the seeds in damp paper,
then plant them, wait for leaves like hearts to take shape,
buds to yield the starriest flowers in summer’s own time—
only for one night—that light up the darkest places.
At dusk, blossoms will grow wide in less than a minute
like time-lapsed miracles. I can’t describe their fragrance,
like gardenia, like citrus but softer, sailing on breezes.
Words can’t touch their sweetness, how they lure the night moths
in & me out after dark, all a-whirr with different desires.
Up too late, I float around the garden, but I never see
a Luna Moth rise from her own glowing bloom.
She is mouthless by design. Her chalk-green feathery legs
pollinate with abandon, shimmer like something a child
would make believe into being. I see her only in waning light
as the afternoons grow shorter. There she is, stilled & spent
on a window screen. She hangs like found art, her watercolor wings
with their false eyes always open, little whirls of worlds unseen.
Elinor Ann Walker’s recent work is featured or forthcoming in Whale Road Review, Nimrod International Journal, Juniper - A Poetry Journal, The Orchards Poetry Journal, and Black Bough Poetry, among others. Read more.