Winter is likewise context; yesterday, I could hardly see to drive home in the downpour, the mountains so whited out. As if snow were its only marker. Hold a droplet to the light; it’s as translucent and still as ice. Winter acts like winter, except when it doesn’t. To define is to act, holding a word up in light and dark to see what it becomes. Mountains are still there; they have to be.
In England, townspeople mourn the death of a 700 year old tree. That day's weather was good, the sun was out, but the oak fell anyway. They had a meeting to ask what to do with the tree’s corpse; some suggested pieces of it be placed around town for children to climb on. A child might remember her scuffed knee in the way a historian touching a pedestal at a slave market remembers the 1820s. Time is tactile. No more growth, no more dying--presence in a dead form resurrected by a child’s knee.
From above, the tree is less a body than a circuitry of branches, arteries and capillaries laid across the Green. I can see mountains through trees, but after trees fall, I better see the ground. The question of post-meditative action is one that bothers me. If mind spreads out cleanly, without a map, where is the ghost of a tree to mark my entry back to the world? A man and a woman now sleep beside the Walgreen’s across from my dentist’s office in Kailua. Tents like mushrooms testify to rottenness. A broken log becomes nursery to ferns. Ferns hold hands up like Ringo his cymbals after a death threat. Another person claims to protect us, but he can only sit beside.
If Jesus had an AK-47, what might he do? Clear out the money-lenders, but leave a carpet of blood and intestines? Answer back to God’s order that he be crucified? The white man’s teeshirt can’t solve this word problem, though he holds these two concepts together as if they rhymed. “Yes, we need a dictator, and he needs to be Trump,” they say, beaming beneath their red caps. Agent of order disguised as chaos. He must be acting so that we can be real.
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