by the fire, Sunday morning I imagine by-yu[1]
so meander out to the plicae between rolling land

higher to the scarp where the red gums thicken;

a Qantas jet groans, the sun strikes sporadically,
under the path of flight through autumn clouds—

from its lonely nook, a dusky roo breaks into
fricatives;

cross-hatches of wash-outs and dirt tracks
to the bitumen wending west to Swan View;

a scenic vista, lugubrious cars slanted at the edge

a  woman with a crew-cut extinguishes a butt
a faceless man slinks into the peace of nothingness

others pass slowly the way to better things:

an imperturbable hydra, squat black trunk
leaflets stiff as blinds, crisp as piano keys played

forté in one long swipe through seven octaves;

tawny cones leaking aloe, striking the nostrils
larghissimo, tessellations of earth acridities

eerily dying back into a rotunda of arachnid legs;

Grey observed ‘violent fits of vomiting’
Vlamingh, ‘no distinction between death and us’

savouring its bready fruits, unsoaked like hazels,

cattle staggered at the poison of the New World,
encased, yet to come, in the sweet flesh of a nut.

About the Author

John Ryan is a postgraduate researcher at Edith Cowan University, an amateur botanist and an avid long-distance walker. The poem 'Orchid Anima' is part of a larger research project that invokes the writer-as-botanist tradition of John Clare, Henry David Thoreau, and Pablo Neruda to create poetic interpretations of the unusual endemic flora of Southwest Australia. He’s especially interested in the relationship between wild plants and humans. He has had plant poems and philosophical pieces published in various online journals, including SWAMP, Landscapes, Australian Humanities Review, and Philament. 

• Read another of John's poems 'Orchid Anima' here...
  

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