Slow Death of the Generic Tree Drawing
by Gabrielle Avena
After Wong Shih Yaw and Safia Elhilo
If it’s okay, I would like to start with the tree,
tenderlined and vanishing.
Focus your eyes on the leaves
which are not leaves as much as
they are bushels which are not bushels
as much as they are clots of cotton fiber
melting into one another.
You cannot find a single leaf
but perhaps a brushstroke, echoing.
As if a waterfall
could flow in reverse
the liquid strokes seem
to stream into bark,
forms linearize, grooves begin
to bump and edge together,
they follow the flow of gravity,
all the way down into
A toothed edge grasps at pale sky. Soaks in
pale silence as the tree first fails
to resume. Instead, the tree fades,
is fading as your eye trails the page.
Underneath, a chopped tree,
stump smooth, top curving
a perfect oval, a closed mouth.
Perhaps it is simply the same tree
at another point in time, somehow occupying
the same plane, or perhaps they are
two separate trees on two separate planes
indistinguishable in their sea of gray.
Even the clouds are ash
not white, as they tell you in school,
as they weave the myth of purity,
as they guide your hands to the pack of crayons
and the roughness of construction paper.
Reach back––
[When did you learn to draw a tree?]
[Did always you start with the trunk?
Was it always brown?]
[Did the leaves ever clot like cotton,
or clouds that got stuck on their way
through the sky?] Perhaps the tree
has only ever known its reality folded flat.
Perhaps, this time, the tree is simply
forgetting itself for a moment,
and perhaps we should let it.