Moonflowers

for David, after sixty

Aiming to make movement unobtrusive 
we brush the mosquitoes from our ankles,
not checking if they’ve gone, since they’ll be back.
Our casual informed chatter buzzes
with place and time, aimlessly drawing blood.
Vulnerable in skimpy summer clothing
we hop from foot to foot, sipping your wine,
as if wine or hopping ever stopped a sting.

Your inner-city courtyard is sculpted
from sleepers, pots, potting-mix and creepers.
Next door a warehouse choir is rehearsing
its Christmas Messiah. The perfect host,
shepherding, you say we better come in.
Only then do we notice the moonflowers
growing from your patch of bad city soil.

There were moonflowers in Queensland, you explain,
never this far south until you grew them
yourself, smooth white circles that bear the moon
as in a mirror, perfumed, in whiteface,
shaking like moths, yet more secretive

. . .a floral version of that slow loris
who came from Malayan rainforest
to live with us in Oxford, drunk at nights
on grapes and Scotch, climbing our curtains
in slow motion, on heat, darting for a moth
whose wing flapped between her prim lips. . .
Your moonflowers scale three-storey walls
as fast as kids racing up the drainpipe
to break and enter, leaving you your poems.
Moonflowers caress the sky or, like Jack
up his beanstalk, entangle with giants.
Immobilised like satellite dishes
they reflect outer worlds to inner,
reaching ecstasy in what they pick up.

Inside meantime, past sixty, you hold forth,
tossing pasta and greens, searing the fish,
uncorking wine, adjusting the lights,
sentence by sentence giving shape and grace,
enthusiasm, optimism, critique—
all the while you are out there in the dark,
velvety white and shining, still no scars,
receptive, shuddering, opening wide.

The literary world prefers its daytime rose,
sweet and thorny, seasonal, blown.
You open only at night, on the ledge,
stepping from your continent’s shelf
like Houdini on a tightrope, flesh tensed,
gazing in all directions at once
like Titian’s triple portrait beasts,
or your own words, pointing and warning.

In the morning you’ll furl your parasol
of flimsy paper away from the world’s
bright eyes, rampant order of moonflower
so flourishing here under your fingertips
that nowhere else could dream such radiance.