Dehiscence of Trees

“This work is real when it is destroyed.”

                                                                                                                             --shop sign in São Paulo

I wasn’t there to hear them fall,

to prove their movements end in sound,

but the broken trees still scream,

one snapped at the neck

posed in recitative,

an operatic cry against

a flat and unfamiliar sky. 

What are these trees to me,

beyond our trust in root systems

and thickness of trunks made real

by the red earth rudely torn,

articulating mute surprise

drying wordless in the sun? 

The neighbor boy’s kite died by hanging

and dangled out of reach,

kite colors turning, entangling

until their brightness weathered away,

leaving a gray kite skeleton

now easily exhumed,

picking bones off the downed limbs,

fingering the remains.

I am dismembered by the oldest apple tree,

burst at the core, apples lost to eating

where infrastructure of the years marks
here the children learned to climb,

hanging like fruit from its branches.

What were these children to me,

always bursting outward,

and why does the naked interior

of this exposed tree

seem like a forced delivery

from the midwife storm? 

The wood smells sweet in the fire,

or maybe just knowing there were apples once,

pies for the baking, eating them hot

before the crust had time to cool.

 

                                                                        7/2//2013

                                                                        for Duane Davis,

                                                                        scholar and tree cutter.

---

[i] title and theme adapted from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Intertwining---the Chiasm,” The Visible and the Invisible. Ed. Claude Lefort, Trans. Alphonso Lingis. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968) p.130-155

[ii] ibid, p.144