Anecdotal Evidence: `A Rush of Cochineal'

Anecdotal Evidence: `A Rush of Cochineal'
Excerpt:
It fed at the Calliandra californica, called the fairy duster, an airy pink puff of a flower. In flight, the bird was a gray blur. Hovering, it glistened green and red like a Christmas ornament. I love Emily Dickinson’s poem about the hummingbird in which she never identifies her subject by name, as though it were too speedy, too elusive to pin down with a mere word: 

“A Route of Evanescence

With a revolving Wheel--

A Resonance of Emerald--

A Rush of Cochineal;

And every Blossom on the Bush

Adjusts its tumbled Head, --

The mail from Tunis, probably,

An easy Morning's Ride.” 

A hummingbird in flight is less an object than a place or process – “A Route of Evanescence” – and its wings in profile give the impression of rotational energy, like a flywheel (did Dickinson imply the pun?). Her rhyming, as always, is wittily eccentric: “Wheel”/”Cochineal.”...