LatinosUSA

I don’t know how it got here, I mean I do, if all you want to know is how it was carried down the hall from one office to another, held firmly to avert a call to the custodian, calling forth his disturbed presence, or 

worse, having to gather cleaning supplies secreted in various closets.  Firmly held, firmly presented, but really abandoned and not a gift unless abandonment is the gift, which is really an exhausted liberated drifting. 

It was nowhere close to the marching trees of Birnam Wood.  I did move faster than the petty pace of day to day, though the day never let go, though I did fret and strut, and that’s why I’ve been planted with this plant that now sits on the crowded sill of a small second story office window that was never meant to open.  

It’s budding, it’s single snaking stalk ending in a large set of double-paired pods striking upward from the white plastic pot like an open-mouthed cobra rising out of a straw basket in front of a cross-legged, flute-playing fakir. In the next office, a too-loud radio for this quiet place annoys the quiet work here. 

Above the congested street, food vendors jostle for position at a busy intersection trailing the aromas of chapattis, dhal, and cut mangoes.  The jingle of ankle bracelets, the scent of patchouli, the wave of a traffic officer’s arm, dressed in his colonial white khaki uniform, urges the crowd to cross quickly.  There is the trickle of smoke issuing from inside each office, numbered slums with computer screens display the flicker of evening dinner fires.

When the amaryllis blooms, I beg a small bottle of Miracle-Gro from a coworker’s lunch. She already has an advanced case of wild vegetation. Shaking her hand is to shake a leaf. I keep the plant watered, religiously.  My blanket and alms bowl always on the floor just beside my door, but no one between 8 and 5 notices my moonlighting.  

The light indirect, the window faces north. The plant always needing more, leans kissing hard against the pane, where there is a faded red imprint of last year’s petals.   In the slow budding ballet, the spade-shaped pod opens into four flowers thrust far above the damp fist of potted soil, a bruised fleshy fireworks, a coronation of helicoptered light.