Not raised but found, this dancer, idling on trash,

abandoned in the compactor room,

fated to be smothered in a green bag,

 

its seven blooms startling, hot pink smiles

in deadpan weather, on the year’s shortest

day, with the long night ahead. Gingerly,

 

sponging off ashes, eggshells, silvery

powder (talc, I hope), from its mossy planter,

I slide it toward high windows, and it changes

 

like fire: sherry to red-purple to magenta,

colors of blood, of beaujolais, of sin

and holiness, of saints on stained-glass panels,

 

light shining through, a diva’s fan.

Fuchsia, the color named for a plant

that must have jolted Leonhart Fuchs,

 

the botanist, when he discovered it

in the 16th century, my orchid’s

serious name is phalaenopsis,

 

for moths in flight. Its wingy blooms

blink, teasing, just out of eye’s reach.

Sunsets they turn the color of red ochre

 

mixed with manganese, powdered and blown

through reeds by the early cave painters, fearful

of beasts, to glitter from a bison’s frame;

 

I don’t know the exact shade of red-purple

the Phoenicians used to dye robes for kings,

but I think this was it, also the color

 

of a rose Yeats set afire to see its ghost.

In my mind the ancient Egyptian

who painted amulets inside a royal tomb

 

wished only for this sizzling fuchsia

to wake the beloved dead, as he mixed gypsum

with rose madder in futile passion.

 

Once as a child I wandered in the park

bordering my usual asphalt streets,

and saw a flower, red-purple on a stem

 

with wings. I called to it, my angel.

Now I give an orchid air and water,

turn down the lumiere, stroke the crooked stem

 

that darts out to reveal wings whose vermillion,

burning against a window facing brick,

defies endings on this cold year’s end.