I seek the mint in the body. It is lodged somewhere. I look for it with my mind.
You who collect dust and crystal oils like wool, will you indulge my woolgathering?
Haremint, you do not need my moist-mouthed words. You thrive in parched patches, in canyons, and on scarps. I ask for a moment to show my gratitude for your patience with me. If you will allow me, I attempt to praise your virtues and channel your ageless glories with my tender tongue.
I praise:
your jubilant bitterness, whose depths are unplumbable,
your ensorcelling stupor set upon the tongue,
your crisp scent sent forth when brushed against,
your leaves covered in white oily dots,
your white and pink flowers, like bleached and blushing tongues, which lap up the sun,
your bitterness no honey can tame,
your sharp flavor matched only by your spines.
[…]
The Divine Farmer holds an amulet in the shape of the primordial leaf, they expounded on the flora thema:
The cloud of butterflies becomes a haremint bush.
Its noonday soul bears amulets for its fruits.
At the height of the sun each flower sings a prayer, the lips of each petals shine in the scintillating air, singing in a multitude of rabbit voices.
Resplendent bees the size of birds are drawn from the ether.
The long gnarled desert bees bow to the hare-mouthed flowers and sup on their mild nectar, which brings about a state of bliss without fullness,
When the nectar enters the body through the mouth, it seeks its exit through the eyes in the form of visions.
The bees see their small cousins dreaming below, collecting meager pollen which fills without bliss.
The elder bees understand: dreams find no purchase here. All water seeming is just so seeming, evaporated right as it is pulled out of the lungs or the stomata. Upwards, insight is held in the clouds' hands. This nectar so mild is full of light, shuffled behind that cloud now, trapped under the horizon then, dragged across the sky soon, ever wherever it twists the mind towards a future origin, the center of a celestial ocean.
In the middle of the great ocean grows a leaf, whose edge is serrated and covered in fine, bristly hairs. Beneath the surface of the water, flowers grow from its lower stems, each flower is the similitude of 8,000 souls, holding their divine plenitude. Each flower’s calyx is greenish blue with spiritual perfection.
Dream the light web of your body, and gather your sustenance as it blows in with the wind. Growing by false suns, and guided by false stars, led deeper into the widening notches in the tree. New life from old, patience, plastic-eating, outlasting the long brutal years of summer in the dark.
As the Divine Farmer brushed their fingertips against the leaves, the haremint released aromatic winds, some herbaceous, some citrus. At the dirt, the haremint roots twisted among each other, wringing the moisture out of the dust.
Then the Divine Farmer took their hand sickle, hooking the crook around haremint’s base, and began to harvest. They felt a line of moisture at their neck.
Plants praise us with their outward manifestations, their workings within us, and their self sufficient beauty.
Roots see, leaves eat. Is a plant knowledgeable? What can a plant know?
We only have our sensory observations and familiarity with the plant's actions. i hesitate to say the plant's mind or soul just yet, because those are both anthropomorphic qualities. I would like to phytomorphosize my problem. Intent, planning, self, and agency are all concepts we ascribe to people and animals, but to apply the concepts to plants without reflection seems incautious. A lone herb each branch giving the other branches just enough room. Seeming to follow a plan, and improvising on that plan: touched by light, angling towards the light, setting improvised electrical impulses in motion, echoes of radiance in viriditas.
You see, but the field is, lady of the open bitter grass in the field whose arms hold us.
The doctrine of signatures written backwards.
When the plant looks into me with its light-eating leaves, what does it see?
Surrounded by order, I look for the wildness that sticks out in defiance. Where in “nature” the settled garden bed calls proud attention to itself, in the sterile car pastures that pave the world over, the slightest errant weed calls forth in warbling song. The eyes come to crave for wanton destruction, the return to something, the tilling of the field. Looking to a clay figurine with a sown field pattern on its abdomen for answers. You live most of your life in your body. But now your sight is graying out in the dark
as a sorceress, i once hid in an alpine plant, i noticed many things:
the filtered flash of sunlight through leaves,
ash on the fingertips
the veins on the underside of a leaf
a mountain mirage image, purple in the distance
soil pocked by rain the way ice churns dirt into anthill-like shapes and then evaporates
the way the cold air and ice knead the ground the water enters the soil, and turning into ice in the night it contracts the soil, forming runnels in the morning, eventually melting and flowing deeper or sublimating in the dawn
mycelium spidering across my eyes like lightning or breaking glass
carying vegetational attributes into another life, i possessed a sasquatch for several thousand years.
i came into contact with this forest person when it nudged some plants deeper into the ground, seeking tender sage seedlings, it rubbed some leaves to know them, and it found me...
on another life and day, my dress fills with the easterly wind, trees inflate as well and sing their soft filtering song. whipped-up leaves follow cloud banks at an offset. the dark gray blue of immanent downpour, and looking straight into the distance, there is light, fleeing. the cave in that hill and the riverbed under the lake are restful, but everywhere else is seething and hurting trying to escape itself
I came to the shore of a poisoned lake and I saw a flask hovering out there.
Mistaking midges, with their flitting, stochastic dance, for falling ashes, then a subshrub appears before me, an exhalation of the bitter ground. Its flowers are a thick white vapour blown.