In retrospect, what should we make of
the labored-over faces, features
which appeared to fit (like pieces
from childhood’s idyllic puzzles),

or predators benignly traced
from the encyclopedia plates,
who crop up in the succession
of houseplants that furnish your tropics?

Favorite leaves would germinate
whole species of unforeseeable
symmetry—memory will do that,
sentimental, unforgiving

medium. Their fronds and leaflets turn,
not toward the sun—that ripest orange
which blazes yet won’t light up a thing—
but toward us onlookers.

And what of the domestic pets
figuring too largely or too little?
Where do water lilies grow well
with cacti; Indians—New World!—wrestle

(You wrestled with that black shape
yourself.) What was too hard to recall—
how things customarily recede
(roads, rivers, a distant vista),

how things are logically grounded
(roots, foreshortened feet), you skirted
by growing grasses, lengthening hems,
elaborating on the better-known.

So badly outnumbered by the flora,
that vaguely feline menace clamped
on its vaguely cervine meal, is less
threatening than boughs of boa constrictors,

burgeoning banana chandeliers,
strategically positioned spikes.
Though grass sabers and fences of reed
prevent any thought of escape,

we are, to be perfectly candid,
elsewhere, posing our private fears.
Could the cultivated really
overtake us? We’re on- and off-

lookers, not unlike you,
rendering our own habitat
with only memory’s thoughtful fumblings
to dictate what goes well with what,

and who, overwhelmingly reduced
to a figurine in the foreground,
should keep a place in the under-
story from being overgrown?