An occasional poem (in free verse) for my friend Sharon on her recent birthday, wrapped up in the calendar, the female body, and plants and their sexual symbolisms, with photos. The poem first, then remarks on its form, then a bit of background information.
A rose for Sharon
… Her birthday floating in
Pride Month, the fleshy
Spadix, girl in the boat,
Cloaked in the folds of the
Spathe, calla lady,
Bilateral beauty —
… My buddy N, birthday in
Mid-December, thinks that
Rose is the name of every
Flower, especially the
Red, radial lovelies —
But all of them, even the
… Tongue-twister plant
Spathiphyllum
Cousin of the calla
The rose I gave to
Sharon on her
Birthday
Remarks on the poem. The poem begins and ends with the birthday. It’s divided into three verses, each of six lines, with an image in each verse: a calla (Zantedeschia aethiopica) at the end of the first verse; a sensuous painting (The Soul of the Rose (1908) by John William Waterhouse) between lines 5 and 6 in the second verse; and a stand of hybrid spathiphyllums still earlier, between lines 3 and 4, in the third verse. The images are figuratively climbing up the verses.
Meanwhile, the two plants with white spadix-in-spathe (bilaterally symmetric) flowers of the Araceae family surround the one plant with red radially symmetric flowers (of the Rosaceae family), reproducing the mirror-image effect of beginning and ending with the birthday.
Now: a remark on what I’ve just said. Almost every bit of this analysis came to me after I’d finished the poem; beginning and ending with the birthday was something I’d explicitly intended to do, and I knew I was folding a lot of sex and sexiness into the thing, and after I thought I was finished I saw the 6-line thing and made a small adjustment to make it perfect — but otherwise I just let things fall as they would, jiggling stuff and revising for a couple of hours entirely on the basis of what sounded good and looked good to me.
Then I went back with an analyst’s eye and discovered all that cool organization in what I’d composed. Yes, I was obviously guided unconsciously to those effects, but they were a genuine surprise. Now I’m a bit concerned that it will all seem too calculated. Which would undercut the earthy woman-on-woman sex theme (and the secondary man-on-man sex theme); a spathe serves as a vaginal symbol, and a spadix as either phallic or clitoral symbol, while a rose can serve as a symbol of either the vagina or the anus.
A bit of background. Two postings of mine:
— my 8/29/13 posting “Kissing the rose”, about the Waterhouse painting, with the observation:
The woman is smelling the rose, but she’s close to kissing it, close to treating it as a romantic partner (in which case the rose is a symbol of the lover’s mouth). Other, more carnal, interpretations are available to modern audiences, for whom the rose can serve as a symbol of either the vagina or the anus.
— from my 9/10/17 posting “The fan, the spathiphyllum, and the impressionist garden”:
Spathiphyllum. Into the land of spathes and spadixes, symbolic sexual organs, which I last visited here in a posting on calla lilies. Some peace lilies in bloom: [Spathiphyllum hybrid image, with note:]
(Of course, neither calla lilies nor peace lilies are lilies; their names are resembloid, not subsective, compounds.)
Then there are Wikipedia entries for callas (genus Zantedeschia); Spathiphyllums; Arisaema triphyllum (jack-in-the-pulpit); the genus Arum; and the Araceae family.
Plus, the woman’s name Sharon is derived from Hebrew name for the beautiful and fruitful coastal plain of Israel (as in the plant name rose of Sharon, for a plant that is, of course, in no way a rose, but is the species Hibiscus syriacus in the mallow family, Malvaceae.).