Boxcutter

Last night in a delirious fury
I took a rusty grey boxcutter and
rather than gouge my eyes out with it I
unleashed it on my college-days poster of
“Oak Tree, Snowstorm, Yosemite Valley, 1948,”
crudely whacked away at the white space and that famous name,
until all that was left was Adams’ original photograph:
a flat horizon, a forest, and a tree.

Though I couldn’t have been too surprised I’d see something different,
(why else would I have done it?)
I was surprised what I saw:
Suddenly I could see that the tree was me,
Or the great, great, great, great, great grandfather of me,
an absurd masterpiece, relentlessly editied by life,
surreal white lace, more abstract than any painting,
carved up slowly and intricately by God
wielding that great rusty grey boxcutter of sky
the product of a delirious fury,
patiently brutal; relentlessly violent.

And yet how utterly calm the tree was,
as if it had wakened from a nap and said
oh, it’s snowing,
exactly the same way it might have said,
oh, I’m on fire,
not “competing” to “survive”
but humming to a tune,
not “hopeless” as in something lost
but without hope, as in what a silly idea,
hope like extra-added white space,
something that was never anything, and never needed.