Fouquieria splendens ....not an ocotillo but a heartdream factory.
you threw me, to the ground. i woke, unconscious for how long? So i ask cloud sheets, pillow cases, blankets of blue rippling hanging on a clothesline across the sky, "How long?" "Just be glad you are who you are." This one yesterday in flower was unusual, like they all are, each time the days stretch. The days always stretch the nights shrink after the Quadrantids. When we become beautiful victims, flowers of fire. ...Sparkly, some one asked for this. There are many here among us, keepers of fire. Fighting off car sickness flu maybe for an instant.
Vibrant life is contrary against pale ryolite. Ocotillo stand above the unsteady ground, crumbling granite. Who knew where flower idols lead? Beneath the ground movement like coral beans flabelliformis or the flickering of flames of aspen with coyote rocks barking. Only one seen yesterday walking during day long plant study. You can clap your hands and dance around.
Most often bloom is an infectious ecosystem wide fertility carnival. Most often is a construct, a box inside which are further empty boxes. It's a meat market pairing up, based on eyebrow tweezing, indelible tattoos. It's a dream factory of sight and smell. Give me, to believe in. It's a group thing, a tangible trans-species thing, contagious like viral sex-fluenza to the point of pushing abundance and preaching a prosperity gospel in the frugal thorn scrub.
Where even if you're not sick with the bucks mating stupid rut you find yourself doing a virtue signal cough, scratch your head to check for velvet or antler rubs or while in silly mode, wrapped in the wet moist dream factory you offer your self to mountain lion as a kill, "Eat me.", just to prove you are alive and capable of reproductive flu, a nuanced dream to see a perfect drop of shiny blood, and let the pain subside. Touching, the flower of fire.
Usually the blooming period is March-onward thru summer and the ocotillos are frequently leafed out. There can be no vicariously usual. Everything is just the way it needs to be, strung out and broken leaking, perfect. In their lush extravagant phase, green/flame/ the blooming often but not always combined with a tremendous show of flowering plants:bees, hummingbirds, ants- this lone solitary blooming ocotillo if not so exquisitely perfect would have brought nausea, vertigo, waves of fear, the frightening sense of ecstasy unrestrained. A contaminated order structure. Because, is it wrong to luxuriate orange beauty circle in monotone normalville?
One thing fer sure, life happens regardless of conditions, even before the urgent clown hummingbirds decide, It's time, It's time. No, it's time now! "We are still doing Christmas." Say ocotillo. Blooming.Forever.
