The smell
of the May night. Everywhere things are fresh.
It's been a
day that turns out better than forecast, better than expected, full sun in the
later afternoon, seventy degrees at the high sun, dropping into the sixties as
I pick the weeds in the last hours instead of going indoors to make dinner. I
chose gratifying my appetite -- my desire -- for the green of the earth. The colors of the flowers please me as well, of course, but there is something especially
strong in all the fresh outpouring of chlorophyll surrounding us on all sides
and from top to bottom, from the roots in the ground to the top of the trees.
I'm
thankful we made the decision a decade ago to surrender the minimalist green
carpet of a lawn for this great oceanic mishmash of the plants we have chosen
and those who have chosen us -- in a crime of opportunity -- to insinuate their
green flesh in every millimeter of space when and where conditions are ripe to attempt
the supreme gamble of growth. The ultimate risk of existence: the Earth peoples
the earth.
Common
violets, nameless weeds -- they have names, I've simply never learned them, for
example the one with five-sided leaves that look like wild geraniums or like
garden geraniums gone wild; maybe that's what they are -- anyway, they're
everywhere.
I lose
myself among them.
Spring
greens are the wild earth's poetry. This collection of "leaves of grass,"
line and meter obscured by the pure multitude of all they are.
They are
life's ammunition against the dying of the light.
The green
scatter-shot, the bullets of the universal urge -- urge, urge, always the
procreative urge (to modify a little more Whitman) -- nothing dies, nothing is
lost, so long as the sun tilts on its celestial shoulder to look back at us,
turns its face, warm and scented with blossom, pollen, pheromone, hum of the
honey bee, the chase of the brown-striped sparrows over the broken-brown earth of the
still unplanted vegetable patch, upon a piece of earth...
The fire in
the senses -- the song in the tree.
The
neighbor girls bickering in their play, the steady drum-bounce eternal of the
basketball.
The new
banshee scream electrical, the profanation of the leaf blower, that instrument
of the devil.
The rise
and surge of the tiny nations underfoot, violets overblooming their allotted
sphere so that man is driven to pull up handfuls of green hair from beds whose
chosen species -- nation, clan -- struggles for the breath of light below.
Speedwell,
Forget-me-not, Mazus -- Hear these names on the lips of ages?
Somewhere
Sweet William hides in the weeds.
A green
wave invades, overtops the chosen ones, I yank them in the joy of haste, know
the root remains below
And will
overcome and will grow over the graves of dying men.
That heads
of tulips have fallen already in the hurdle of time.
And flowery
hands of pansies, over-extended in the friendship of air, wait for the ax --
And yet why if
not for such days do we live
To watch
the mayfly of understanding
Flicker in
the green light of the new, the fresh,
the renewal
of time
The
fountain that fills what it overflows
in some fresh
ecstasy of movement
Of which we
drink so long as we live life and
sense and
thirst for its living.
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