Here is what you get with this post: two videos, some notes, one poem, and a chance to enter into my blog garden, my Switzerland of reiteration (i.e. annotate at will, ad hoc, and furious or slow).

The first video is part of the inspiration for the post.  It is a video of our cosmos and zinnia patch.  Magical.  I was surrounded by critters great and small.  A hummingbird thought my ear was a flower.  Soon disabused of that notion, but not before I felt the tip of its beak chittering and chattering with intent. The usual cast of butterflies, but resting and eating and paying me no mind whatsoever.  Moths and spiders and quite likely snakes and moles on or in the ground.

Here are my notes, my pollinators that feed me and my urge to make.

 

Here is the rawest of poems, fluttering and buzzing up from this ‘daybook’ garden:

Raw Material of the Cosmos

Gathering seeds

from the garden cosmos,

from last year’s seed gathered:

Buddha’s Hand Cosmos, an orangey gold–

Yellow Cosmos, phosphorescent daytime fireflies–

Mixed zinnias, but hardly common–

Milkweed, perennial feed for the Monarch–

Cupcake Cosmos–

Ha! Sweets for the sweet–

a universe of pollen and light,

alive and aloft

a cosmos in a frosty flat cupcake of pink and white.

 

A painted lady butterfly alights on my salted sweaty arm

taking a long drink,

its proboscis a flutter almost

Too tender to feel.

 

A hummingbird mistakes my ear for food,

making it ring for a moment

as it parries, unrequited,  with beak and tongue.

It does not object to being tricked.

All the flowers use their wiles

to get what they want

in this Switzerland of pollinators, neutral and forgiving,

they just move on to other food.

 

As I gather seed

I scatter seed.

It is almost too easy

To plant next season’s cosmos.

Just as the raw material

for this year’s reiteration of the Cosmos

came from last year

so too is the raw material

for this poem

already a poem

needing to be shattered

And scattered.

Here is the second video that was a crosspollination of  a glacially slow reading of Marc Hamer’s book of nature essays, A Life in Nature and my IRL experience in my garden “cosmos”