Pram-pushing her child along the path, the astrophysicist felt utterly wordless with the trees. Lacking their language and their graceful lines, she wondered at how her child had found the conversation so soon, how tendril-her knew what they meant?
Those trees that whispered nattered chattered plotted & gossiped all about the astrophysicist.
What of Herman Hesse, said that
“trees hold their history in discs”
“What then of our history?”
If we do indeed radiate
“Where-off spins our history?”
Where to land the shards that have been us?
Where escape the pettinesses? The velocities hurled?
Where, the how, to collect, see, read, the learn?
How the learn?
How to stand as example, how to guide to glory or, at least, from shame?
In what how-so-many exploding cells do we remain, persist, teach?
Indeed, then, what the point of parenting, that illusion of control? That delusion of knowing? That complex of superiority over clearly-deranged un-developed minds growing pimpled, cratered, awkward & gap-toothèd?
The childrens’ souls lacking symmetry the hearts sans compassion the hearts clutching compassion only inward like the dead inside rings of the tree, the native matter from which the good doctor says we’ve all exploded?
There were imperfections only and from them we sprang and spring and expand and, apparently, too, we radiate.
And we thought to shake off our dust
We thought the dust was for the shaking-off.
We thought the dust a nuisance.
We made machines to cleanse us of dust.
We killed birds for feathers w which to dust ourselves off.
We flicked it off like poisons, like imperfections, mosquitoes & ticks.
And yet the dust-to-dust, the fairy tales … the belief in our rightness wobbling amidst the upright trees, like Nietzsche, like Beethoven, not the craven, fear-hungered hermit monks who we’ve believed themselves kissed by stars, carried a light, knew where to find history and lead us thereby.
And yet, here we are in craven, virus days in which we only pray for dust amid the upright chattering trees —as we the sleep, the sit, the spin— and ask the trees from rotate, the radiate, the illuminate us from within.
