Buber 12

 

There’s a white car in the woods, just uphill from the marsh; in its back open window, an American flag. Patriotism of the dispossessed, Dispossessed once, dispossessed twice. Dispossessed! Emotions sold at auction, counted out, never banned by the banners of thoughts. The flag is not a book, hence cannot be banned. A book opens. At a distance, Eucalyptus is closed, best described in an adjective: “majestic,” “grand,” “solid.” Close up (at a near distance?) the tree opens, an ear of black bark jutting out. The photograph has blue sky behind the ear, not to be heard but seen as contrast. For the artist, a painting is a prayer. For the poet, it’s prayer and epithet both. Eucalyptus’s silences might make me angry, if there were hesitations in it. The totality of it is like eclipse. Forced to focus on moon instead of sun; cloud instead of sun, your vision becomes an either or. In truth, language does not reside in man but man resides in language and speaks out of it. Or echoes inside it, as in a grain elevator, lacking grain.

Eucalyptus stands

In a stand of monkey pods

Straight man to their jokes.

On the days when there are no photographs, the photographer feels himself a failure. But there are always photographs, a friend writes; it’s a question of mood. Days when the eye’s lens gets covered by a smear of anger, of distraction. (We think anger focuses us, but it only distracts more violently.) When the surroundings are all selfie. A selfie stick is like a tree branch, though the tree never takes them. We have faces to focus on. The tree has more faces than one lens accommodates. If it turned to us, we’d smile our fiction of joy, then retreat into ourselves. Attention is forward; it risks the right flank of an opposing army. The camera your bayonet, thrust forward into a battle against thick air. It meets the tree as adversary, then regrets its hostility. When I post your photograph, I won’t name you. It makes you more general, less specific, more a citizen of the image than exclusive owner of it. Who’s to say who owns stories, the teller or the told? Our ethics is stronger than our will to stretch it into embrace. I will wrap my arms around that home where my mother lived her silent years. An embrace opens it, takes out the locks, the doors, the fences, the words by which we confine what we love to a small space. We talk about love as if it were hostility. I offered my mother to kidnap, considered her safe, answered the 3 a.m. phone calls (not hers, but those in her stead). It was all proxy at the end, words voting for other words until none were left. Talk to her, they said, but nothing seemed better, more true, less infected by noise.