Holy Heathen Rhapsody by Pattiann Rogers

CO-EVOLUTION: SEDUCTION
    1.
    Summer, everyday, the flurry-hover
    of feeding hermit hummingbirds
    and clearwing moths, bee-pause
    and butterfly-flutter on shaking petals,
    all those tongues lapping, licking,
    and probing, the shiver and rub
    of furry heads and bodies pushing
    into the deepest crevices for nectar,
    coming up dripping sugar and powdered
    with pollen and off for the next one . . .
    2.
    Having grown up together, the lesser long-
    nosed bat plunges perfectly with its bristly
    tongue to sweep the sweetness of the saguaro
    blossom. The hawk moth’s tongue delves
    its full length to reach exactly the far bottom
    end of the comet orchid’s narrow nectary.
    Bumblebees with magic keys are everywhere
    opening snapdragons with magic locks.
    3.
    In the early days of our beginnings,
    when our first mothers came upon those colors
    in the clearings—dawning pearl petals,
    warm golds and startling scarlets, seductive
    violets and dusky pinks growing in among
    the monotonous greens—they were pleased.
    Blossom perfumes rose spicy, winsome,
    nostalgic with sun-and-moon fragrances.
    The people fed, though the flowers were not
    food, left them to bloom in the scratched-out
    earth. Their seeds, mixed with the others,
    were scattered and sown, season after season.
    Though fragile, they thrived, all the while
    cultivating deep in the bones of the people
    the gentleness of care they required,
    invoking in the genes of the people
    a new longing for beauty.
    The loveliest ones they wove
    through the hair; the hardiest they placed
    on the breasts; the favorites they enclosed
    in the folded fingers of the dead.
    4.
    One of us could be the night pollinator,
    flying with fur-covered wings of skin
    north from Mexico over the rocky
    slopes and seared bajadas of the deserts,
    toward the mad musky fragrance
    of the organ pipe cactus, its budding
    flowers ripe and swelling in the dark.
    The other one could be the blossom,
    scented and sedate, the lightest shade
    of lavender smooth as white waiting
    in the night, ravaged, then graced,
    pinioned on the tip of the tallest stem.

HOLY HEATHEN RHAPSODY
    As if underwater, she floats and shimmies
    slowly upward while the sun warms. She pauses
    to sink again through the green and deeper
    green garden leaves of this single tree,
    its edifice all of Eden, earth and paradise,
    slender branches bending and flowing
    with the morning currents.
    Summer lolls, lingers in its own mazes,
    a white-limbed poplar, leafstalks, peel
    of scented bark. Her body—seed wing
    or feather down, thread slivers of silk—
    touches each curled lobe and creviced branch
    as she passes, slides underside, overside,
    along the ridges and furrows. (Is that a tiny
    tongue finding the way?) Love is this sun-
    holding tree of lapping leaves, delves,
    canopies, a multi-tangled cover.
    A spasm of breeze, the tree shivers, each leaf
    twisting white flash/green shadow. By will
    or wind, she moves stemward toward the steady
    trunk, following fissure and tangent, rests
    finally folded in a woody niche. Who could
    know better? Regard the celestial; the sky
    is not shelter.



SUMMER’S COMPANY (MULTIPLE UNIVERSES)
    The sun is a total green of light
    inside a single mimosa seed riding
    inside the sky-green and river-
    green of its buoyant pod canoe.
    A black tern holds its feet flat
    against its body as it wings
    through the green skies and currents
    of an earth winging through sizzling
    star celestials. A ship, a speck
    passing by above on the green
    undersurface sky of the ocean, has no
    notion of the volcanic flow seeping
    from a sizzling crack in the earth
    miles below, the only line of light
    appearing on the ocean floor.
    It could be a frond of fern sizzling
    and spooling, unfurling its green
    wing within the current and wake
    of the day, the only frond of fire
    appearing on the rain forest floor.
    Remember the eye of the tern,
    a speck of sky in which rides
    for this moment the full wake
    of summer and