I Have Been Looking At Flowers

[for Carol Ward for her beautiful photograph of, as she said,
'a lotus resembling a swan"]


she said  "this lotus resembles a swan"
and we peered closely in the looking glass pond named for
Lily Pons through

an actual photograph

out of a dream;then it seemed to me perhaps
I have been looking at flowers all wrong
and all my life

never seeing that they were gliding
and that the air around them made a kind of watermark
in wedding golds and whites

and that they flowed there with great significance and imprint

that perhaps in each flower soul there was concealed a
birdlike core prone to soaring also
if only it could be so;

an element like a moon whose phases were petals of pearl

and they could imagine themselves also snowing, whirling
above the stars and the treelines falling and falling
from great heights on little children

into the errant and the silver meteors,
their own parachutes forming;

shimmering down on us encoded in starlight'
time exposed above their former gardens
or full of pink and green momentousness

over the castle splendid
forever and ever.

mary angela douglas 14 july 2019