Flowering from the blackest centers
06/18/2007 02:56 a.m.
The woman walks up the hill, carrying her own coffin, thinking “With too many words at our disposal we cry under their burden.”

She walked for half an hour or so and then, where violets sink into themselves and the starlings refuse to nest, the woman came to rest. She positioned herself on the rough edge of her coffin, rich with graffiti and leaves, and watched the condensation simmering off her wet shoes. Her thoughts drifted to her father’s fishing trip where across the lake he fished, swallowed up by the fog; the mushroom farm on the way to her college, spinning strands of mist from the mounds of damp black-brown compost. The interplay of air, pressure and temperature all going about their invisible business of expanding and rising, and contracting and sinking.

The coffin’s wood was beautiful, worn, unvarnished and wholesome-seeming as though it had been constructed out of all the wooden things she’d seen and felt and smelt in her life: Firewood just starting to burn, pine kernels, the antique sideboard that never looked quite right in their house, her favorite school ruler, wood shavings, bark, wood glue, resin, memorial benches along her favorite riverside walk.

As she gently stroked the coffin, she realized for the first time how much she loved wood. Like water, it had a complicated life cycle all of its own, and in its afterlife, served to furnish the houses and apartments of human beings, to be the very log cabins and boats and what nots in the service of adjacent life forms.

“I wish my body could be that useful,” she thought. As though they’d heard, the branches released a yellowed oak leaf onto her shoulder.