Pollen

Posted on March 24, 2009 in Plants Pulmonary

We celebrate the flowers and the grass as we sneeze at them.

I can see it floating on the wind out there, big white seeds that we used to swat, crush, or knock down — that we called fairies — a-riding the wind. Under the microscope you can view its lesser kin: big yellow cannonballs broken out in the pox. This the season for these particles to ride up your nose and massage your nasal passages until your sinuses gather wind to expel them in a hard, sometimes vainglorious, sneeze. The sacrifices we must accept for clear spring days….

I can’t say that I stand for the abolition of pollen because that would mean the extinction of plants especially grasses which wear their hearts on their sheaves and conduct their sex lives where all can dip their noses in it. My eyes itch and my nose tickles because the local oats cannot keep their affairs private.

I do not know much else about pollen except it also resides in flowers where bees or moths must douse themselves in it. Shoddy evolutionists speak of it as a conscious contract when it is nothing more than luck, a pattern repeated over the centuries that ensures reproduction mostly because of an initial stroke of fortune on the part of the first flower and the first fly who found it. Still if the hairs on the bee’s leg do not carry the gold dust to another flower of the same species, the flowers will not bear new seed and there will not be new sources of honey next season when the children of the male and female sprout and call “to me, to me” to insects on the wing. Starvation ensures no more bees and butterflies. No more bees butterflies ensures no more fields of yellow mustard and no spots of pinkish [[Mariposa_lily|mariposa tulips]].

It’s easy to forget this when you’re rubbing you eye with a half fist and preparing to catch a sneeze with cupped hands. Misery occludes these comprehensions but no one but zealous realtors call for the abolition of meadows and the brush and then not for the purpose of alleviating suffering but for the singular pleasure of their having enough money to enjoy tennis and sail off the coast or on blue lakes on weekdays. The [[bunchgrass|bunchgrasses]], the oaks, and the [[chamise]] are permitted to exist for the sake of the sense of beauty and openness that they bestow. Were it not for this mitigating factor — this memory, perhaps, of [[savannah|savannahs]] and forests — we might well scrape the earth to mineral soil to save us the drudgery of constantly minding and cleansing our eyes and our noses as best we can.