Scales

I harbor a secret vision of myself.

I am on the bike path by the river, pushing a purloined shopping cart in front of me. In it is a scanning electron microscope.

More macro, more macro. I am muttering. People steer clear, look away.

The weed lady has gone a little mad. She has become a species of Wonderland Alice, the eat-me, drink-me kind, babbling about pixels and resolution, rods and cones. She snuffles close to dirt like a pig after truffles, and comes up gasping:

More light ! More eyes !

Weed lady wants to enter leaves through their stomata and tunnel her way down to the photosynthetic atelier: it's green there, shot through with magnesium flares, very photogenic.



Weed lady wants to walk through queer, misty forests



and fly above stark, shadow-ridden terrains.



She would even consider landing in a deep vallombrosa, a shadow valley,



just long enough to mourn, shepherdless, the fallen



before soaring above the flat green fields and florid trees of a beautiful planet, so new it is still unnamed.



But sometimes even Weed Lady returns to middle earth, the land of neither big nor small, returns to human scale, drawn, for example, by the dervish dance of a pinwheeling sumac's early death.



There are secret volumes in Weed Lady's workshop, where she keeps the most mysterious and precious of her images, images taken with the most serious and potent of lenses, the ones that have no limit. Look:

How can something be so very, very small ?



And what procession navigates this blue vein ?