Springsense photo, recording and all text c Irene O’Garden 2012
New this week: If you would care to hear me reading this week’s post, click here: Glossolalia Recording. Please note I am still in the Stone Age with this technology–for now only a black screen will entertain you as you listen.
Glossolalia
Zest of grass. Saturate, tearspringing fragrance. We must stop believing we can’t believe it’s spring and inhale. Pause. Strum and plunk, shaken rope of birdsong. Verdant elbows of unconing leaves, arrowed shafts of dawning lawn, prickled palms of blackberry.
Birds. Do we tweet like them? Territory. Pride. I am here. Listen.
What withdraws?
Perhaps tonight is not the night to express. Is tomorrow fresher in the crisper? We want to save our best for when the best are listening, but what bird reserves its best? Do not love your work more than its flow, they sing.
Spittlebugs foaming the fieldgrasses, nodding with dotted lady beetle, gleamwings petal from summer’s ascending green rafters. Swelling thumbs of plums, wrens wrestle in the crabtree, important conversations. Bluebird claims the narrow apple.
But haven’t all songs been sung? All but those in different alphabets, undiscovered scales, new translations.
Delicately varying temperatures layer scents; fresh and fecund shift. Words alone inert in this gnattery. Crumpled, dry, husking the green urge to sing, to speak, to even pray: Whomever the sirens this morning carried, bless you. May your body be sound and your home be whole.
The urge itself, a glossolalia of nature I can almost understand. These beauties seem like sentences and yet elude articulation. But express. Express. For how shall the voice of the bird be given and the cone of leaf be unwrapped and you be left voiceless? Wordless, perhaps, but not voiceless.
Grass fountain, lavender asparagus. More beauty tomorrow. The more beauty we see, the more beauty we see.