Buber 18

Each morning I read a walk poem before our walk, another patch of language full of verbs and prepositions, those that push us apart or pull us together, act in the poem or in us, like priming the pump to expel unnecessary air. I haven’t seen Eucalyptus yet today, but we’re old married folks by now, comfortable in our distances that are not distances, or are distances even when we’re close by. I sit, therefore I am not a tree. Camera blurs Eucalyptus's bark so it appears to move away from; the black bark and drops of yellow sap fizz into a tableau that is no longer tree. Get close enough to your object, and it reappears as something else. The back of the asphalt laying machine turns to fine grained wood, or a book whose pages might turn. The broken plastic off a car turns into a red flower, rhymes with another at the curb, though plastic seems more alive than the old flower. What appears is sometimes stronger than what is. Which is not to devalue what is, as is comes first, in advance of what cannot dissolve into narrative time. The landfills are full of busted images, as are the beaches, covered in shredded plastic, their lights bright like Christmas, but so out of place. Place in time, or place out of the time to which it rightly belongs. Fast food toy on sand. Plastic land shark. Its bite is on delay. Like all word problems, post doom is a mystery to be solved, at least theoretically. We’ll never change, but our plans will, not that we ever follow them because someone always coughs to make the silence sing another chord. Discord, c’est moi. I left my I and Thou downstairs; I’m writing upstairs, inside but with the outside air sounding of palm leaves and maintenance, rain again, which comes in patches. To come in patches is to live within a cycle; isn’t that odd? A motor starts, then moves away. The clock ticks, and I’ve forgotten to wind it. My microwave has beeped. The dog scratches herself against the dirty couch. It’s not comfort so much as habit that sets me here, laptop on my lap, to list whatever presents itself to stolid me. Claude has found a leaf to hunt and chew on. The dog’s ears are up behind her blanket. Calm outside the storm: another shooting, another legal case, another all caps tirade. Pull yourself within. I know you understand, Eucalyptus. It’s your bark that falls, not you. I find no alteration there.