When I Heard the Learn’d Botanist

Jay Udall

After Walt Whitman and Stefano Mancuso

When I heard the learn’d botanist speaking on plant cognition,

when he discussed how we live in vastly different time scales,

leaving their movements all but invisible to our frenetic eyes;

when he showed quickened images of two bean stalks climbing

air, aware of each other & the central pole they reached toward,

competing, loser recognizing outcome, seeking elsewhere;

when he described how plants perceive & respond to sound,

touch, gravity, temperature, various chemicals, certain smells,

electromagnetism, moisture, light, pathogens, parasites &

dislocations, fluctuations in oxygen & carbon dioxide—

how they sense the world in at least 19 ways to our 5;

when he posited, like Darwin, an awareness distributed

in their myriad root tips, orchestrating without conductor

by means we don’t yet fathom, together creating a form of

swarm intelligence like what we see in groups of birds & fish—

how they communicate, cooperate & contend with other plants

& animals, learn & adapt to changes in their surround—all

that enters in where they circulate fluids, nutrients, hormones

& voltage, messages pulsing between parts to assess & solve

survival’s trials while circadian rhythms cycle from seed to death;

when I heard they comprise more than 99% of life on the planet,

something in me quickened, I rose & wandered out into open

light among those we’ve named trees, grasses, reeds, shrubs,

mosses, mushrooms, ferns, weeds, vines & creepers, & knew

we are the sleeping ones, dreaming inside our own hyper

brilliance while all around us other kinds of mind & being

slowly, slowly reach, feasting on shine, fastening into black.

Jay Udall has authored six books of poetry, most recently Because a Fire in Our Heads, winner of the 2017 X.J. Kennedy Prize. Read more.

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