I never said good art, but I’ll fall into the black hole where all those things I can’t conjure with effort and intention come from. Melancholy is a sweet drug. They say Enneagram Fours bathe in the mood. I can confirm. Draw me a bath and let me dissolve in those waters. I’ll come out puffy eyed and thirsty for sleep, but I’ll grip the pen with my pruney fingers and put down words that will grow into something.
Sadness is a very passive emotion on the page. Not in life — not for the artist. We create to save ourselves. It’s an autonomic response, like digesting food. Or throwing up.
I know what people do when they see you cry, so I imagined how trees would act if I walked sobbing through the forest.
We’re nothing alike — people and trees. We seek the right words to land between the branches, but they filter them like the sun and cast shadows upside down where we can’t reach. One day we’ll fuel their fruits, give our thoughts away to their trunks. They’ll outgrow us all.
If we shut up and sit still, maybe we can take a sip of their conversation.
The Slowest Love
To teach a tree what tears are
takes time. Or a lot of brine. The scent
made me want to learn when you first
walked past. Then the weekends, weekday
afternoons. I counted half a moon
before you noticed me and the curve
of my trunk that took the shape of your
mother’s lap. We live slow here,
talk through the ground. That day
you looked up at me I was prepared.
My daughters at the end of the path
warned me and I began to move.
I scooped the air with my branch
closest to where you always sat
one atom at a time. You thought
it was the wind, until it grazed
your ear. And stayed there.