Can I speak to the object, let the object speak? How can I address you, disintegrating, crumbling wood chip, not really knowing what you are, less where you’re from? What will you say in return? You speak. You say: I am a piece of the vasculature that pumped a million gallons up a hundred-foot conifer. A shard of redwood, I am. It doesn’t matter how the life I was part of ended—which it hasn’t. Don’t grieve if you destroy my tiny trace!
Tuesday, November 6, 2018
The Shard of Wood
One of a box of objects. Reddish,
striated. Size of a very small bird. Thought it was a piece of petrified wood, but when I picked it up it had no weight. And brittle—broke into
three pieces the moment I touched it, pulverized at the cleavages. Seems to be the
dried-up pulp of an insect-damaged tree—there ARE tiny holes in it. But it
mainly reminds me of a plump lizard or a tiny toy papoose—but only by
sight, because now I’m afraid to touch it, afraid I’ll break it even worse. Like
the clovers pressed in my late friend Ellen’s copy of Woody Guthrie, a Life—broken just by looking.
Can I speak to the object, let the object speak? How can I address you, disintegrating, crumbling wood chip, not really knowing what you are, less where you’re from? What will you say in return? You speak. You say: I am a piece of the vasculature that pumped a million gallons up a hundred-foot conifer. A shard of redwood, I am. It doesn’t matter how the life I was part of ended—which it hasn’t. Don’t grieve if you destroy my tiny trace!
Can I speak to the object, let the object speak? How can I address you, disintegrating, crumbling wood chip, not really knowing what you are, less where you’re from? What will you say in return? You speak. You say: I am a piece of the vasculature that pumped a million gallons up a hundred-foot conifer. A shard of redwood, I am. It doesn’t matter how the life I was part of ended—which it hasn’t. Don’t grieve if you destroy my tiny trace!
