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188 Two poems by pattiann rogers Summer’s Company (Multiple Universes) The sun is a total green of light inside a single mimosa seed riding inside the sky-green and rivergreen 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 its green currents, 189 the spool of the sun in its dawning. It could easily be a shawl of light placed around a woman’s shoulders as she rests beneath a mimosa, unaware of a seed drifting high above her on the green undersurface sky of July. See how the green fronds of the rain unfurl, spooling away in the ocean’s current. Look again. A crack appears across the universe of a buoyant pod. The first throb of the seed’s green fire is dawning. 190 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. 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 those early days, when we came upon their colors in the clearings—dawning blues, golds and violets, startling scarlets and evening pinks growing in among Coevolution: Flowers, Tongues, and Talents 191 the monotonous greens—we were happy. Their perfumes rose spicy, winsome, nostalgic with sun-and-moon fragrances. We fed, though they were not food, left them to bloom in our scratched-out plots. Their seeds, mixed with the others, we scattered and sowed. And they thrived, all the while cultivating the gentleness they required from us in the bones of our hands, in our genes a new yearning for beauty. We wove them through the hair, laid them on the breasts, placed them in the folded fingers of our 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. ...

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