Wesley Sexton
Don't They Know I'm Building A Paradise?
Cover Art: Jonas Wood, Untitled from Eight Etchings. 2014. One from a portfolio of eight etchings with chine collé. MOMA.
Don't They Know I'm Building A Paradise?
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Days after the cable man stomped out
my kale sprouts, strange people arrive carrying chainsaws. They are here to chop down a tree older than the family who owns it, and when the human population dwindles and fizzes like a pinched wick, that linden will still be gone, even if I hadn’t yet spent entire days staring at the thing, hadn’t buried a thousand seed pods, hadn’t yet enacted strange rituals of gratitude. Does anyone else think it miraculous that roots might crack a foundation? What knowledge we have and how we wield it. I watch the men tie a rope to each branch, make wedge-like cuts, then saw through, and each bit falls exactly where they want it to fall. Everything is carefully planned, even as I sit reading the science of trees – how their leaves pull in the air around us and lock it forever in their wood, how they make such use of our exhalations, be they lamentation or fume, how they love lamentation specifically: our CO2-laden sighs have each green thing grinning after a human tragedy. They hold in giggles as centuries of strife and assassination pass by. Apparently a linden has hidden itself somewhere in England and has been waiting humans out for 2000 years, just like one season’s blight or borer, our chainsaw-flinging is that fleeting. When the men leave, I go out and stand on the stump they’ve made. I spread my arms wide, enacting absence, waiting for suckers to sprout from under my thumbnails. As usual, nothing at all beautiful comes from my body. |
Wesley Sexton is pursuing an MFA in Poetry from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Connecticut River Review and the Indianapolis Review. Also, his reviews have appeared in journals such as StorySouth and the Adroit Journal.
