1

Here you can enter a cloud.
The moss pillows your feet,
orchids adorn the twisted trunks of trees,
which dwarf as you go higher,
through the cloud

to the elfin forest,
now the trees bow beneath the droplets,
like a people
beneath the holy water from the aspergillum.

Who knows what you may see here in the cloud forest!

Look—bright gold shining there in the ferns!

2

The Golden Toad was first described,
and so discovered, in 1966;
but no sooner was this incarnation
into the word accomplished
then the toad in the flesh disappeared.