09

North Mountain sends down green flooding the embankment

the city moat and crescent lake shimmer in the light

counting every falling petal I forget the time

searching for sweet-smelling plants I return home late




— Wang An-Shih, translated by Red Pine, Poems Of The Masters: China’s Classic Anthology of T’ang and Sung Dynasty Verse, Copper Canyon Press

Thank you for calling The Botanarchy Hotline. The Botanarchy Hotline is medicine disguised as a poem, delivered through the portal of your phone. It’s a ham-radio séance between you and the living Earth, for those ready to be bewildered back to life.

The transmission at the end of your telephone line is Episode 9: Counting Every Falling Petal I Forget The Time. It’s the fourth week of summer, leaves are heavy with the hush before the heat, and today, we’re forgetting clock-time and remembering falling-petal-time.

There’s a deep medicine in forgetting the mechanical clock and slipping instead into the slow drip of Earth’s own reckoning. In early summer, time doesn’t tick, it drifts. It falls from blossoms and eddies in the river currents, it’s measured by how long it takes for a petal to loosen its grip and leap. It can even be marked by how many inhales it takes to find the scent of something sweet on your evening ramble. 

In the mythic green blur of before, when time was still a living creature, folks told time by crickets and condensation, by the way bees tilted homeward at dusk. Time was something you sensed, not something you measured. My favorite of these sensual clocks of yesteryear are the jiéqì, twenty-four solar terms that carve the year into poems, etching the soft spiral of change.