So each poem is going to get rougher as we go on.
This one is called a "Slow Down Now"
and it's also in four parts.
I was reading-- there are books that you
can read about how to communicate with plants
and how to make a relationship.
And my subject was the rose, but the plant I found
turned out to be a plant called an Apache plume, which
grows in New Mexico.
And it actually is a relative of a rose.
"I've been sitting, looking at a plant,
without feeling time at all, and my breathing is calm.
There are tiny white rosettes and the whole bush
is a glory of feathery pink seed heads here in the Arroyo.
Even with closed eyes, I see roses
in the center of my sight, new flowers opening out
with pink petals illuminated by sun behind me
and gray green leaves.
There's no stopping this effusion.
Looking at the plant releases my boundaries,
so time is not needed for experience.
Late afternoon is like a stage, a section
of vaster landscape and my mood is of a summer idle.
The dry Arroyo sparkles all around.
Meaning I come upon on wild land strikes me,
at first as a general impression,
then joy suffuses me.
I accept that I've aged and some friends have died.
At first, meeting is part of the plant.
It has not yet unified with my experience
as a whole, like sight opening out to its peripheries.
There's an impasse between my will,
my desire, and the resistance of a phenomenon to reveal itself.
My seeing is so slow, it seems to disengage.
It becomes very cloudy.
Then suddenly, meaning as a whole
interweaves with my perception.
Desire was the motive force, like meteorological forces.
I repeat the words freshness, tenderness,
softness, the happiness of birds,
as if speaking directly to a plant.
Sunlight's a profusion of pink plumes, thousands
of feathery seeds already reaching
into the empty space where I've taken a branch.
That space was left open by the vision I'm having now.
I hold my first sight of the Apache plume
and the present next to each other, and go back and forth,
comparing them.
I see its multiple aspects as living representations,
its herbal actions and fragrances, its dynamic
and our ecosystem, its appearance in other habitats,
symbiosis with birds, medicine, administered by an oracle.
These aspects are not referred to, not associative,
but intrinsic to sight.
As I run my perceptions backward and forward, gaps diminish,
and slowly missing images appear or experience fills in.
One transforms into another along in extending
multi-dimensional excess of seeing a plant.
It's not a metaphor for the flow of our surroundings.
One day, you may need a plant, you don't yet know,
in order to connect pieces in yourself or in a person you
are trying to be with.
It may be a rose bush at the end of the road,
a summer rose, whitish on the outside
of each petal and pink inside, expressing
its gestalt visually.
When a plant receives this kind of communication,
it begins altering chemicals, its wavelengths
reflect in order to offer itself to your imaginal sight
for you to gather it.
The plant or another person awakes
from embedding in the livingness of the world
and takes notice of your request.
The internal chemistry of plants is one primary language
of response that they possess.
Through this method of your perception
of its color, its fragrance, and infusion of its petals,
you not only receive molecules of plant compound itself,
but also the meaning in yourself the plant is responding to.
So there is meaning in a chemical compound.
Even though the rose I want is in the garden of my friend
I miss, an Apache plume reveals itself
in late light in the Arroyo, when I'm alone.
A wild rose, Delphic.
Illness is not healed simply by supplying
something rose colored and lovely as a medicinal opiate.
Beauty provides form for meaning.
And though it does help my body, form to form,
I'm not only what my senses perceive,
and my disease is not just physical absence
of iris fields.
When a plant projects coherent electromagnetic frequencies,
organisms respond, becoming more open, animated, connected.
They use this amplified field to shift biological function, DNA
alters, there is communication across distance.
They can intentionally insert information
to strengthen cooperative interactions
among, for example, an Apache plume, ants,
and an agave in the riverbed.
Like human families, whose interweaving, loving bonds
represent the long term incorporation of supportive
co-evolutionary fields, continually
embedded with new data to enhance connection.
You and I nest within many such fields from a rose."
[APPLAUSE]
I don't know.