A newborn afternoon

You emerge.
Silver light cut by curtains settles across this room in ribbons.
The faint sound of eyelids popping open, and you see it all with milky-blue newborn eyes.
Your arm is asleep under your head. You roll to your side and pick it up with your other hand. Heavy, the arm falls to the mattress and bounces like a stranger’s.
The things you see move like waves. Independently. You roll to sit -- it’s someone else’s body.
The sun is setting. How long have you been here?
It wasn’t like this before. Things have been changed. Moved around. Your skin doesn’t match your head.
You sleep. You wake.
Time to get ready, go go, get up. It’s always so hard to stand. So hard to lift the weights off eyelids, and fight. Fight gravity and the chill of the room outside the sheets. You stand; find clothes to wear. You pick them from a pile and lay them on the bed next to where you sit. You stand and totter drunkenly. You place a shirt over your head and pull it down around your torso. You step through pant legs and look into the mirror.
The face is grey.
The clothes are rumpled and wrong.
Just a few more minutes. A few more minutes of sleep, you think, and your body is bouncing to rest on the box springs.

You emerge.
The room is black. How long have you been here? You see the night sky through a gap in the curtain and the window glass. A break in the orange gas haze allows some pale scattered stars to show through.
You look around. Rub your face with sweaty, trembling hands. What was that pill you swallowed? Try to focus.
The colorful spray of light in your mind gestures.
You follow.

You emerge.
Bed. Wedged in sheets so long. But up now, up on your feet. When you stand you let gravity course through your stock and bury you in the ground, and grow here by your bedside. Grow thick in the sun. The ground is spinning plates. You sit. Look down at these soft musty folds of the sheets that open wide for you. This is the sunset warmth of your baby brother's birth.
Your young mother wakes, and raises the blanket for you to crawl in beside her. So you roll next to her warmth, and lay wrapped in the convincing scent of your dreams.
The love is so thick you see it.

You smile as you dream through your newborn afternoon. And dream, and dream, etcetera.

Plant Matter

They speak to us, you know, the trees? There are voices in their cones and leaves, and the way their needles splay out, set against the sky. And in their color, silvery green and long, bare black stems, reaching far above, with dried branches like bristles, broken, silhouetted.

They aren’t speaking with words. Not voices you can hear. The voices are sentences you see above you, that tell you where you are. Where you are in the world.

Their dialects and phrasing changes. They tell you different things, the places you go. With powder white trunks, or dense canopies, the spacing between them, or the withered, craggy nature of their growth.

Their words are in their body language, and when it is its most eloquent you can hardly see it, and when it’s harsh, it’s all you see. Beautiful and wily, dark black, curling upward in a slow struggle for light. The way life always is when it balances on something so thin it’s almost imagined.

And yet, as ornate as they are, their words are only for us. The sentences, only for animals that read them. Alone in growth. As much meaning as mountain, or river-round stone.

Those words are silent unless we translate them. Their living, dying, breathing words are transparent, careless, useless unless they are used.

We give them words and we give those words meaning. Without us the trees are only themselves, elemental buttresses, holding up only themselves.

As it is supposed to be, we think.

But without us they will remain. Fecund. Stretching into sky. Still speaking, but in new languages, for other creatures to hear.

They will grow without us. Without an echo of all the proof they always offered: nothing was made, nothing was intended, there is no such thing as god.