Consider the botany of data, its stems and its seeds, its invisible leaves, the boughs and brains that it bends. Consider how nothing that changes knows what it needs, Or that nothing that grows knows how it ends. Modern times disavowed its hierarchies, but I recall a coat-rack from my childhood, and a candelabra of names and tropes. Artifacts remember being trees by spreading their fingers, becoming gestures. How does language graft life onto a thing? It is neither machine nor metaphor, but something between. Its fractal form sews meaning into a similarity between the abstract forest and the forest of trees. The singularity, the stanza, budding through digression. Its leaves maintain false dichotomies and the elbow of a branch cultivates recursive decay, the undoing of symmetry, the matrix of seeds.
2
Consider how knowledge is more like a sap than a fruit. It maps an encounter within its embrace, gradually reifying, losing pliability. From the obscure root to the bleeding bark, a figure emerges like a broken face or an unbroken star. Its arbitrary representation (and its heart) was made in the red cadence of repetition and randomness. In the splintering of a wood factory, a braid that autumn incorporates into its damp foundation. Under the story, the world keeps splitting its seams while we try to gather some truth into our gardens and beds. An arbor of machines that spreads its Ovidian limbs, its rough coercion of formal beauty. Its root, leaf, and node. My shadow branches from me, and you from it. My hands, your narrative, the imagination’s needle sews a tree. A pattern that ramifies and brims, a structure that proliferates through decomposition. My dream, your bed, this memory, this tree.