paperback_writer
Smash Rookie
- Joined
- May 3, 2008
- Messages
- 1
I found you in the evening as a half-moon pushed through languid overcast. Your twisted branches gnarled the moonlight into a tattered quilt that fell meekly through the darkened edges of your leaves. At last, I thought when I saw you, here are the **** trees.
I walked up to you and placed my hand on your bark arbitrarily choosing you as my support against weariness. You felt worn and broken. It seemed that winds and rains had attempted to peel you away like some pulpy fruit ready for the taking, but I knew then as I know now that you won’t be uprooted so easily. You’re a bulwark of natural expression with roots firmly anchored to the soil. You resist the motion of time and human breath. Human exertion.
I pushed myself away from you and felt the soft dust of your bark on my palm and fingers. I felt something then like a nostalgic pull at the back of my mind. I found you just then, but it was years ago when I first met you.
It had been 400 miles north in the basin of Central California where in the winter the fog rolls in thickly like white sap and movement is all struggle until the vernal sun sets arms and legs free. I was sitting under you staring into the flesh of your bark where red ants scampered towards a tangible purpose hidden in your core. Your bark was darker then, but the clefts on your body were similar. “Are you okay?”, I was asked as I stared into you. I was at a seventh grade math competition and my mother was in Fresno in a cell, faced with deportation to a land whose earth she hadn’t felt in 22 years. You were there as I found out. My math teacher pulled me aside and took me to your shade. Your leaves feathered out in the sunlight as they did eight years later under a partial moon. My teacher left and I placed my hand on your uneven surface. The dust from your bark had tickled my palm and fingers embedding itself into the memory of sensations.
The dust on my hand eight years later took me to then, to when you first stood rigid against my pressure. In the dim light I stared at you completely uncertain on what else there was to see. A faint coastal wind swayed your branches. Your leaves clicked with the activity of possible life. I pulled one off. I held its narrow frame in my palm. I examined it and took in its green coloration. I made a tear and inhaled the scent of its enduring naturalness.
There is a man I saw last week who prompted me to go find you. He asked me to write as much as I could about solely you in two pages, but your details are only the surface of something deeper. Does he know that you are more than an isolated tree in a dirty industrial corner? That you are a body linked to life through subterranean veins and nerves? That you are coalesced with memory into something beyond your parts? I will see the man again. I will be required to show him these words and hope that he can see your coarse surface breathing with life, your looming branches jutting into the mellow moonlight, and your upright leaves like roaming buttresses holding up a million pockets of glistening memory against the blackness of a devouring sky.
I walked up to you and placed my hand on your bark arbitrarily choosing you as my support against weariness. You felt worn and broken. It seemed that winds and rains had attempted to peel you away like some pulpy fruit ready for the taking, but I knew then as I know now that you won’t be uprooted so easily. You’re a bulwark of natural expression with roots firmly anchored to the soil. You resist the motion of time and human breath. Human exertion.
I pushed myself away from you and felt the soft dust of your bark on my palm and fingers. I felt something then like a nostalgic pull at the back of my mind. I found you just then, but it was years ago when I first met you.
It had been 400 miles north in the basin of Central California where in the winter the fog rolls in thickly like white sap and movement is all struggle until the vernal sun sets arms and legs free. I was sitting under you staring into the flesh of your bark where red ants scampered towards a tangible purpose hidden in your core. Your bark was darker then, but the clefts on your body were similar. “Are you okay?”, I was asked as I stared into you. I was at a seventh grade math competition and my mother was in Fresno in a cell, faced with deportation to a land whose earth she hadn’t felt in 22 years. You were there as I found out. My math teacher pulled me aside and took me to your shade. Your leaves feathered out in the sunlight as they did eight years later under a partial moon. My teacher left and I placed my hand on your uneven surface. The dust from your bark had tickled my palm and fingers embedding itself into the memory of sensations.
The dust on my hand eight years later took me to then, to when you first stood rigid against my pressure. In the dim light I stared at you completely uncertain on what else there was to see. A faint coastal wind swayed your branches. Your leaves clicked with the activity of possible life. I pulled one off. I held its narrow frame in my palm. I examined it and took in its green coloration. I made a tear and inhaled the scent of its enduring naturalness.
There is a man I saw last week who prompted me to go find you. He asked me to write as much as I could about solely you in two pages, but your details are only the surface of something deeper. Does he know that you are more than an isolated tree in a dirty industrial corner? That you are a body linked to life through subterranean veins and nerves? That you are coalesced with memory into something beyond your parts? I will see the man again. I will be required to show him these words and hope that he can see your coarse surface breathing with life, your looming branches jutting into the mellow moonlight, and your upright leaves like roaming buttresses holding up a million pockets of glistening memory against the blackness of a devouring sky.