Only the Infinitesimal

^{(for Asclepias tuberosa)}

It seems I can’t get my head out of the magnified graces
of infinitesimal beings swirling all around me in this season of burning,
this stage of heatwaves, wildfires, and cataclysmic human destructions,
this apotheosis of scientific climate warnings
and global temperatures steadily warming,
polar icecaps and glaciers melting into memory,
into oceans’ unstoppable rise rise rise flood flood flood.

New York City had a year’s worth of rain in a matter of hours,
and I can’t get my face out of the flowers,
can’t stop watching the honeybee
bouncing from the bright petals of giant zinnias,
coral, violet, red, pink, back to coral—
the perfect electrostatic velcro of her body
pollinating all the colors, playing bee footsie
with small yellow star stigmas open and waiting.

On her hind legs, golden saddlebags
are stuffed swollen with nectar-sticky pollen.
A honeybee can hold a million grains of pollen
in each of those saddlebags, miraculous,
and she is just here, in our garden,
doing her undaunted bidding with the planet—
here with her other honey and bumble friends,
spreading gametes to ovules, propagating flower sex
and sowing hope for some semblance of tomorrow.
She works, dances, dives face-first into colors,
as do the tiny tongues of hummingbirds,
the minute feet of beetles and iridescent wings of butterflies,
all pollinating, so that later there may still be              life.

I watched a milkweed pod crack open in the summer heat
and reveal dozens of sleeping seeds inside
all lined up like tight soldiers
about to jump from an airplane—
the war             against humans perhaps,
the battle         time,
so glorious is their perfect milkweed seed design.
As they loosened in the wind, I saw each brown seed
was equipped with its own ethereal feathery white parachute,
ready to rise into a drift of air and land in some willing soil
to bury and grow and sprout and feed again
some Monarch,
some unappreciated royalty, perhaps a queen.

These wondrous things are happening
while the world is burning, friends,
and maybe if I name them,
if I lend them my pointed attention
and signal in keys my undivided gratitude,
that vibration will pound its own subtle harmonies
into all of the breaking around us.

If we are, in fact, all connected as matter evolving
to Spirit, perhaps if I genuflect
my poems
to the holiness
of only the infinitesimal,
something will bloom              that is infinite.

Perhaps if I focus
the whole of my cosmic heart
on these minuscule mundane miracles,
I am helping somehow to build a new world,
heavy with my stuffed golden saddlebags
and ethereal feathery parachute,
pollinating the thoughts
that energy can
follow
into manifestation.