Consider the hummingbird
How like the mind it is
Flitting

Bee balm to daylily
1200 heartbeats per minute
200 wingbeats per second

In a universe 12 billion 
Years old
In pursuit of love

The hummingbird can dive
60 miles per hour
In the courtship 

Dance 
250 breaths per minute
Forward backward

Its red throat
Is not pigment in the feathers
But a refraction

Of light like the shimmering
Of intelligence
We see

Everywhere in the garden

*

And the child (this would
Be me) at naptime
In kindergarten

Lying on a mat on the floor
In the darkened room
50 other kids


Miss Verlaine standing
high heels right next 
to my head

Face up I silently slid my mat
Toward her feet until 
My head

Was exactly between her high heels
And I looked up her
Nyloned

Legs looking up up up into
Darkness between 
her legs

Then slid my mat back
And pretended 
To sleep

But little Alice Stuyvesant
Saw me and all afternoon 
She looked 

At me and I didn’t know
Whether she would tell
The teacher 

But I didn’t care because I had looked 
Into the darkness and 
Survived

*

And looking up into the night sky
Is like that 
The mystery is  

You can’t see much 
But you imagine
Everything

Even God If you want to call it that
This intelligence, this 
Cunt

This darkness we live inside and is 
Everywhere even
Here

In the garden where the hummingbird
Moves from daylily
To bee balm

Its small feet tucked behind
Its muscled chest with more than
250 breaths

Per minute its wings beating 200 flaps
Per second its heart
The size 

Of a peanut squeezing out 1200 beats
Per minute and how
Much faster

Is the mind with neurons sending electrons
Across 30 trillion
Synapses

Every second and how much faster
Than the mind is the mind of
The universe

Which as night comes we see
The stars and the stuff
Between 

The stars
The living tissue
Of reality

That gives us this
Hummingbird

The whirring of its wings and the glint
Of red at its throat
A deep

Mystery in the mere fact
We experience
The world

As whole and beautiful with
color and music
and joy

In the redness of red the taste
Of mint the stars
Popping

Out like musical notes