s u m m e r
cypress
The photo has a cypress tree dead center of its composition. It is taken at an odd angle and from far away. It looks like a hand reaching up out of the earth. A dead hand from a mass grave, each knuckle angled and curling skin, bone, and roots into branches.
It's the most disturbing photo in the show and one of three that deal with organic matter.
A rose and barbed wire.
A mimosa tree in bloom, bright and somehow reminding me of the bottom of a drained and cracked pool in Florida.
All the people mingle and drink, sign the book, smoke and I notice the place is a collection of silver jewelry and black eyeliner. I recognize a lot of the folks and a few of whom I haven't seen in sometime.
I talk to a few but I can't let the cypress go.
No one seems to notice it. The rest of the photo is made up of water droplets on symbols and they rather look a lot like balls of mercury from a broken thermometer.
You almost could miss the cypress. I did hear a couple people mention it, but they were reflecting on its beauty. I guess it could be beautiful, but to me it is grotesque and obtuse with perhaps the remotest possibility of beauty lying in the discovery of form and subsequent redemption.
I order up a fresh stout and light a cigarette when I notice a chair open up by a coffee table. I sit down heavy and draw deep from the filter, shaping my ash on the rim of the glass tray.
The smoke hangs around due to the lack of ventilation and it begins to look like cirrostratus clouds. Just like the weather posters on the institutional green walls of flight school. Those cinder blocks heavy and thick with years of paint covering almost all the depth of the concrete, almost all the texture gone, given way to the latex scar. A smoothing of the rough. A covering of the grain. Resistance to penetration.
A monument to the inorganic.
And in the middle of it all my fingers, like the branches of a cypress, move with the forces of environment, element, and chaos.
Sensing.
Feeling.
Searching.
goodnight 4.15.99