Robert Oventile

California Dodder

Looking like a primitive computer’s tangle of brain wires, a dodder lives on a green-leafed
shrub. The tangle’s yellow-orange tendrils bite into the shrub’s stems. The shrub and the dodder
blossom with small white flowers; bees land and go, land and go.

The shrub’s leaves draw from the sun, its roots from the earth. The dodder draws from the shrub.
The bees draw from the plants’ flowers, regardless, a colleague having taken to their hive’s
dance floor to waggle silent directions to the nectar.

Organic form, chaos. Medicine. Poison. The urge to weave a story from divergent threads. The
urge to clean, to comb out, to render original. Nothing exists without relation; all exist
regardless. Yet the adjacent urges remain distinct in their flavors.

The story urge would articulate relations through a parlance of verbs and proper nouns, a torn
web of hailings, a dream, given the dreamer’s thoughts remain of the dream, a fantasia persistent
whether in wakefulness or in sleep.

The origination urge would focus an appearance shining and distinct through light and air, a contemplation without outside, a distinguished silence, given the hush and withdrawal, whether
of the dodder, or the shrub, or the bee, or the earth.