“setting out to make a garden in which…to take…delight, yet in soil most unfruitful and full of weeds…uproot the weeds and…set good plants in their stead…We have now…like good gardeners, to make these plants grow, and to water them carefully, so that they may not perish, but may produce flowers which shall send forth great fragrance to give refreshment…so that…may come often into the garden to take…pleasure and have…delight among these virtues.” with tears—or, if there be none of these, First the seed softened by time, pushing past the surface of the earth, extending through a stalk out into the air, unfolding two leaflets like furry lances to fork and grow and grow and grow into a tree. All of these parts: roots bark wood foliage calyx corolla pollen fruit and seeds can be used. “Already the flowers are opening: see, they are beginning to send out their fragrance.” scopolamine and atropine. hyoscyamine, cuscohygrine, noratropine, meteloidine, littorine, and acetoxytropane. All of these, the placidula eurynassa, eats as a fat worm: nibbling away at fleshy leaves and trembling corolla until there is nothing left but the structural outlines of plant matter, digested and stored, suffusing its tissues with toxins. Never fall asleep, never sit beneath the borrachero tree, they say. Beware of opened, pend— ulous blooms: “The tree has a spirit in the form of an eagle which has been seen to come flying through the air, and then to disappear; it vanishes completely in the leaves, between the braches, between the flowers.” She lays out arched like Endymion like Danae The marble curve of her lips is soft and hard, open with limp limbs clothed in mounds of white gleaming cloth. Eyes half-closed, seeing without sight. Rapture is irresistible. It comes as quick desire, violent shock; you see and feel this cloud, or this powerful bird rise, bearing you upon its wings. inward and outward we moved and stared vacantly , “See you are being carried away and you know not where.” Deathly pale, born off, lifted from the ground: away away away “Grant me no more favours.” Wa tching from the tree top: cold sweat rolling, lips wet and twitching without rhythm, joining pools of tears to water the hard earth and the roots beneath. Blood beats through the skin, the body shudders. “Sometimes, my pulse ceases to beat at all.” To be, on the point of death, like a rope around the neck— Golden spear, iron-tipped, plunging into the heart, the entrails, not once but many, dragging them out to consume. “There are things of which the memory has no recollection.” Tramp ling underfoot all the things of the world, becoming unwrought. We cease for no longer than the twinkling on an eye; exceeding.
