Jeff

When the axe came in and severed me from everything that I have ever known I thought that I was dying. And I guess that I was. ###
I did not then know words like trunk, branches, lumberjack. Or Seperation. Or death. I began to know them, as I was stacked on the back of the great truck next to my brothers and my sisters. Once, they had swayed next to me. ###
I still do not have words to describe what it was like, when I went from being that living tree into the wood that I am now. I was severed. I was turned into a legion. I was metamorphed. ###
The first hands that ever held me with Love are her hands. It was a wide space. Open. I think that who I am, it was not so much that it flowed out of her fingers. It is that she was shaping my internality as much as those cruel saws had once shaped the outside of me. ###
I felt so different. And not different only from what I had been before. You see I can still feel, distantly, that which was once a part of me, that which I was a part of. I know that my… call them brothers or sisters. I know that my brothers or sisters came to be things of need. ###
My brothers or sisters they came to be chairs. And firewood. And support beams, forever hidden by siding. I am not jealous of them. ###
Most of the time, I am not jealous of them. Because her hands shaped me for something else. Her eyes ran across my surface. And there were more saws. But I did not need to even forgive her for that. By the time that I was a pair of elongated ovals, a pair of round-end rectangles, by that time, it seemed like this possibility, this true nature had hovered within me. All along. ###
When I was painted by her caloused hands, it was something of a caress. And just a moment of wrongness, of strangeness. You see, when that paint clung wetly to my surfaces, it was, for the first time, not right. It was close. But not right. ###
And then I dried. And my faith was not just restored, but it was made greater. I dried. And it was as I was meant to be. How could I have missed it? I was half of who I was meant to be. And now? Now, I was closer. ###
Can I explain what it was like to be embedded? Would you understand what it was like, when my two halves were joined into one whole, and when I/We were joined with that metal. And made complete. And we/I were almost finished. ###
Most of the time I am not jealous of the chairs and the tables and the picture frames and the paper and the toilet paper. I am art, you see. ###
I was art, you see. ###
That fine line, not down the middle of one of my halves was the last thing that needed to be done. I was complete. And then it came. ###
I was art, you see. I was in the studio. And the people looked at me in wonder. It is what I was made for. ###
That time came to an end. I was in her work shop. And then her closet. And then she died and I miss her. ###
They took her things and brought them to that place. They sat in the chairs and beheld the picture frames and they knew what these things were, and they loved them, a little bit. ###
I was marked in that time. The pencil came from a tree that was like the thing I had once been. Before. What is Rs/ 5? Who is Rs/ 5? ###
I do not know what they mean. And they don’t know what I mean. And it is because they do not know what I am… I don’t know what I am. What am I now? Won’t you tell me? Will you tell me?