Thursday, February 26, 2004
Pollenation
Preface:
1) It’s been raining, and not like you get it back east - this has been a gol-durned gullywasher with some serious flooding and white-out downpours, the kind of rain that makes you remember that water can kill if enough of it gangs up on you. By some quirk of fate, I somehow got my mail-order goretex rain pants only last week, so my tender vittles have remained dry and comfortable even when my shoes are so completely filled with water that my feet have to wear goggles just so they can see where I’m going.
2) It’s springtime, or springtime is starting anyway - daffodils are being pummeled by the harsh weather and flowering trees are bravely trying to keep a few petals on the boughs. Plums and cherries are struggling, but acacias (sturdy brutes that they are) are doing great, exploding with little spherical yellow pollenpods. Looking for information about this noble plant, I find this, too, which I can’t help but find gigglicious. Yeah, and I’m allowed to drive and vote as well.
3) I’ve been all poetical lately. Maybe it’s because I haven’t been keeping up with my daily readings in the Norton poetry book, but whatever it is, I’ve been writing more stuff lately with linebreaks and meter than otherwise.
4) I’m tired and burned out and inattentive. More so than usual, even. So if I get an urge, I’m much less able to resist it. Such as, an urge to impose upon the blogreading public a longish poem about acacia flowers and rain. Oops, here it comes. I promise, tomorrow’s post will be brief and silly. Meantime, if you don’t want to see a grown man beaten stupid by a dithyramb, don’t bother with the extended entry.
Pollenation
Acacia flowers dust my life.
The elephantine tree outside the house
where I grew up three lives ago
would fill the thickened valley air
each springtime with its pale gold.
The trees, I loved before I knew
a name to call them -
loved their gnarled climber’s bark
their tendency to make two trees
out of a single branch, with
leaves of lanceolate parallels
erupting next to delicate bipinnate cousins
cohabitating on the bough;
I loved their gracious canopy
the rustle of their leaves at night
the only thing I didn’t like
was sneezing when their pollen choked me.
Moving north changed lots of things
but still acacias shaded me
and shed their powdered seed upon
my streets and habits, ever more
profuse and rich with granulated sun.
Thus spring remained a time of pollen
covering the cars and sidewalks
making dense the vernal air
until the rains came thundering
and plastered down a yellow paste
in gutters, filling sidewalk cracks,
no longer propagating trees
nor tickling my nascent sneeze.
The ides of March that year rained buckets,
drenching earth and brick and leaf.
I’d spent too long inside, my legs
were aching for the burn of effort;
bicycle had gathered dust
and, in its underutilized condition,
mocked me as the rain poured down.
So when at last the water stopped,
despite persistent clouds that threatened
to deluge me any moment,
I strapped on my shoes and hauled
my trail bike down to the street.
Three blocks and I was in the park,
alone but for the slugs and puddles;
bedded roses waved me forward
down the shining strip of blacktop -
but something made me make a right
and I rode over to a path
unpaved, and shaded by acacias.
Sodden grass lay down behind me,
then the trail dipped a little,
dirt beneath my knobby tires
soon completely drowned away.
I saw before me standing water
wide and yawning, dark with promise,
overshot with stands of redwoods,
eucalypti, and, of course,
acacias all ablaze with flowers.
As my tire touched the blackness
of the deep impassive puddle,
I could see acacia pollen
scattered on the water’s surface,
gleaming pale from the gloom
in unimaginable patterns -
swirls and spheres and twists and serpents
spread out on those two dimensions,
backed in blackness like a million
nebulae in outer space -
it gave a sense of depth unending
as I slowly pedaled through it
twenty feet from side to side
and fifty feet till land resumed
and every inch of it inscribed
with irrepressible abandon -
glowing, shifting yellow patterns
breathlessly I floated over
miniature universes
eyes astounded, mind amazed,
unfathoming I glided forward, left a wake
of shattered magic on the water.
I would be the only one
to see those stunning newborn worlds
and, as I lost myself among them,
in the silence of the grove
the tires settled in the mud;
I found myself precariously
balanced, lacked the strength to turn
the pedals to which I was fastened,
stuck in fastness on the waters…
The bike began to list to port.
I put my foot down in the mud;
the water reached above my ankle,
soaking coldly to my skin
and sullied wonders filled my shoe.
I set my feet into the muddy bed;
I lifted up the bike, and waded forward -
shattering the pristine plane
with every clumsy step I took.
I splashed the crystal into splinters,
never got to see the further
half of those amazing patterns
formed by pollen in a puddle,
crushed them into muddy sludge
got on my bike and rode back home
on streets as straight and clear as rails.
I took a shower, rinsed my shoes
of all the mud I could remove
I never really got them clean -
a little earth and yellow seed
remained to stain their very fabric.
Some of that mud stuck to me
as well, and I too now am colored
by the memory of space
revealed on a shaded pool
in tendrils of acacia pollen.
