\ tree of tenere

occasionally, i step away from my desk and look outside and think about anything other than what i am working on, imagine i am the last tree in a deserted forest, an acacia cursed with roots run too deep, and the only pleasure i have in this whole, entire existence is the vastness of my thoughts. and then it no longer seems like incarceration, because the distance between two memories is greater than than the distance from here to the moon, how wonderful and maddening the remembrances. i could re-experience my recollections without complaint, make only slight edits to the things i probably wouldn't repeat, but the mistakes i would keep intact, because this shows growth. the imperfections add such richness to our all-too-perfect lives, like scars and eye patches and skeletons and seams.

this same, late summer darkness has comforted me for over thirty years, and i am eager to prove myself wrong about a few long-held truths, strike a few words from my vocabulary, easy answers given when a young mind is confused, i remember hearing always and heaven and family whenever the realities began to creep like desert expanse into the backyard of our early history. I don't know how on earth the sprouts ever returned.

through that back window i am amazed at how difficult it is to find truth in nature, amazed at how easy you can see desperate optimism in the cars driving off into the distance, one of which might eventually crash, drunkenly, into the last tree standing for 300 miles in the middle of a desert, bring an end to some uninterrupted line of reasoning.

what amazes me is the longevity of these seeds. someone asked, once, why not just cut it down and spare it the misery of solitude, proven by the fact that it no longer flowers, and perhaps a young scientist is charged with taking a core sample, finds that in spite of its small size, it is, in reality, hundreds of years old, a diet of scarcity thinning out the rings, which still count as revolutions, nonetheless. And a thousand years from now, the rains might very well return, and a different scientist, in a foreign tongue, might say, I am happy no one cut this flower to the ground, and am amazed I found it at all, in the middle of this deep, lush forest. it is a tenacious creature.