From this short talk, take away that you are a blue nerve-blood tree, filimental instrument of perception, cultivated and cultivating yourself into finer and finer tunings.
The eye. What even is an eye? Light seeing itself, said Ronald Johnson, of the phenomenon of material and energy organizing itself into an eye.
Poetic seeing, poetic attention, the light of attention. The refractive, reflective act of sensing.
Language sorts our senses into streams of sight, smell, sound. Language sorts our sense data into discrete concepts: into animate/inanimate, plant/animal. Sorts the eye into lens, cornea, aqueous vitae, blood vessel, optic nerve. Sorts the plant into tree/leaf/stem/cell.
[hue]
What even is a plant? The boundary between plant and animal suddenly needed a lot of language to police, in Erasmus Darwin’s day, in Linneaus’ day, when European colonial scientists were fighting to definitively name the branches of the tree of Life.
[brain stem]
[affection]
A lot of my work theorizes the healing quality of being in the forest, and the joy and pleasure of turning our attention to plants, as the phenomenon of recognizing ourselves, as a fundamental, sensual recognition of kinship.
The dendrites of our brains grow in response to how we use our attention and our bodies. We literally grow new branches of perceptual capacity. We can grow ourselves to see ourselves as sensitive trees.
From this short talk, take away that you are a blue nerve-blood tree, filimental instrument of perception, cultivated and cultivating yourself into finer and finer tunings. Some languages know that better than others. What capacities will you water with your daily cycles of attention? What language will you invent to culture your own kinship with plants?
[LXXXIII]
Hue
In many languages hue is not separated into blue and green. It is all blue, greenish. The body sits like a greenblue stem under the sun. Human, all its greenness is inside, flowing back blue rivers from its extremities. Tides of blue sky come in, move out of the lungs. The system sips clear green water. Mouth tears up at the taste of lettuces. Who can know even all the blue leaves on the tree outside my window? How many monks sit writing in the walled city of the cell? Every breath a kind of autumn, the little green platelets reddening again.
Brain Stem
Strong neck the channel through which your roots become branches. Strong neck the trunk through which your impulses flow, tides of perception and reaction. You are a battery of cells, positive of material, anti-positive of nervous potential. You, a dyad of bunches of waving branches and bundled branches, of bunches of searching roots and rooting roots. The spine of your decision-making: a flexible tension between head and heart. The moving tree grows in more dimensions than knowledge: in its reach, yes, in its span, but also, if it is lucky, in its rootedness, in its density, in the neck’s rough skin thickened to injury, that lifts above its heart a head of power – ever spring-fond, ever fall-wise – a tender leafy power to love light.
Affection
I am an information tree.
Pulse and impulse object, me.
And I, impulse and pulse activity.
That a data river
Through an ear can rhyme:
This body smiles its sense sublime.
Rods and cones the blackuponwhite text
Connects to what is manifest
In words like perfect, zero, God, subject.
Ectodermal cells became my melanin,
My sensitive [nerves, [brain, [interpellated skin]]].
From all one stem, my without and within.
Learning seasons, again and again.
I smell of fear and lost leaves.
Taste of discipline.
Tree! Tree! Tree!
The fractal {irised} of my eye
Maps in your branches apples of my I.
LXXXIII
Rain forest verdant. Sawtooth-edged salal at your hand’s height. Drops of jade glinting. Now green cut diamonds, there, underfoot: water droplets. Rosy pussytoes push rosefeathered white tufts from green florets. Pointed alpine firs, just rising above coastal forest, stir. I found, or thought I found, my own understanding in the viridian exteriors of the unceded. The bathmic, subarborescent tenderness of a poet’s mind is equilibrated among the dendrites that green here. Forests have instincts like global positioning systems: to walk under their report to atmospheres and satellites is to you yourself become instrumental, geotactic, sexed with plants. Narrow-leaved owl-clover, maiden pink, arctic eyebright: Salishan knows their information well, far better than any modernist quietude will. Douglas water hemlock to Douglas maple to Douglas hawthorn: a forest translated by botanists speaking of worth. What worth there is in you, Douglas can’t English. You grow in this unrelinquished silence, the fronds of your mentality synching with the aspen colony, its underground idiom, sprout-tongued. White spruce, shortspur seablush, Sitka alder. False bindweed, common rush. The forest’s glory begat Hul̓q̓umín̓um̓, a language dumb foreigners misheard. My interpretation of rain forest says beautiful by being mute, or whispering: iyómex thqá:t. Leafy liverworts, downy veilworts under cloud. Light drizzle veils the cliff fern and brings out the malachite green of mossy branches. The forest lives more life with me in it: one solemn life, walking the territory of resource fairy tales. Iyó:lem, say the plant brothers to scraggy consciousness. Larix occidentalis, is all our poets can, in rival praise, devise.
