Buber 21

Farewell, Eucalyptus! Not as substance, but as idea. I want to gravitate toward fact, but my eco-meditations wander off with me in their thrall, sentences that stick to other sentences, sappy, insubordinate ones. The tree distinguishes between form and format, between hard wood and the soft pulp where words go when they leave my screen. Think of them as seeds, or screeds. The double ee’s leave trees for thoughts. More than ought, I think. Imagination turns us to a You, Buber says, but isn’t it It that we need to save? Is there a You after the coming storms, driven mad by climate change? Without It, there’s no You, or do You, too, ascend to heaven, Eucalyptus? Or stay as the gray wash of ash beside a new grave? Today, the dog and I found coffee cups in the cemetery. One had been purchased by Lisa, another bore only its kind, and the third read “thank you for composting me.” I’m glad the punchline came last; an out of order joke never ends well. The graves are about lines: grandfather, mother, sister, son. A baby named Cadance, etched bear on her stone. You too are composed of lines, sticky ones and straight ones, brown marks between sheets of black. White print on black costs more, I remember, and the pages tend to smudge. We find fake paper money sometimes, good only for burning. Transmission through ash and smoke, a white kite blown over the green wheeled incinerator. I’ve wanted to transmit something of you, Eucalyptus, but I fear the wandering is mostly mine. My camera proves we’ve come to know each other, but not what has been said between us. Saying is not surface. Surfaces suggest, but there’s no recording them as sound, except as insubstantial palm leaves like those outside my window. My friend tells me that “thinprose” is better than a mistake. Let this thinprose resemble the thintree, so nearly thing. The You we say to [them] sticks to the threshold of language which is sometimes black tar, sometimes brown sap. Threshed and held, such a thin harvest.