The crimes of the trees

The world is large. They have made it small. The question of home, the salty and the sweet. The trees at home are gone, denuded by the philistines who took the house. Still, Oxossi waits for you by the trees. In dreams he attacks, his beak splintering the pane that separates you. Glass recurs again and over again. Windows, windshields, broken and shattered, the metamorphosis of Hamra after the explosion, the now glistening streets flooded with the shards of hope, of the confidence, the trick now exposed. We are not safe, we are not well. The glass was a promise. Something has changed but nothing has changed. The trees of Hamra must remain hidden lest they tempt the bonecutters, the petrol-fevered osteotones yielded against wood, making kindling, making lumber, the cruel substance of a different sort of kin. He keeps his distance, but Oxossi alights in these trees as well, so near to the doomed sea, so far from the necrotic river, choked with the blood of cattle. Oxossi knows how to act, but he also know how to wait. It is a potent spice, this blend. For Oxossi, the roads cannot be blocked because he can fly. The migration of the raptors and the waterfowl. The eagles return to Iowa, to the Driftless, because the abundance of riparian tide pools makes for thin ice and dull fish. They come to hunt. I do not know how the eagle became emblematic of America but it seems entirely appropriate that such a beautiful predator should bear this weight. Their murders are premeditated. Vicious children in a merciless sky, they stalk the river, they speak with the clouds. The geese are another matter. They lack the fortitude of the raptors, and they would prefer not to prey. But as the winter comes, the snow threatens the timothy, and the eagles assume command, driving the geese from their homes, an imperious, occupying power that does not know how else to be. Living chiefly off prairie grasses, the geese have been robbed of their most cherished aliment by the settlers and their implements of iron and steel, but these arrangements are new, and likely temporary. One day the settlers will be gone, but the eagles and the ice are ancient enemies. This place, these hills, these valleys, their home, was made by the ice and to ice it will, it must, return. When the ice comes, the eagles go on the attack. The geese are wise enough to retreat. Very few of us take the lesson. And then you wake up and it’s America. You stumble outside and it’s America. You wake up and it’s Dubuque, of all places; you are disoriented and you do not know how you got there. This is not sarcasm or spite. The anterograde amnesia means that you do not distinguish one moment from another, and memory is a comfort you are not allowed. I have the luxury of forgetfulness, yet I wear my unconscious on the outside. I am sitting at a table once owned by my great-grandmother; I am looking at the toy pistol made by her husband, my wastrel great-grandfather, for their doomed son, a child who did not survive the Depression. Above that, is a flourish of graceful Arabic, a painting made for me by a student in Algiers. The student who painted it was named Farid. Ten years after he was in my class he would reach out to tell me that he and his wife had a son and they had named him Adam. The crime of Adam was the theft of knowledge. Of course I would choose to compound that sin, to sow that seed. For me, the tree is still there but the garden is closed. It was never that welcoming to begin with. Now it is overgrown and wretched. The grapes go unharvested, wine seeps into the soil. Next to the painting is a portrait of Maya Deren, beckoning with the mirror and the knife. A devotional candle sits on an inlaid box from Cairo. The candle is dedicated to Saint Jude, the patron of lost causes. The box holds beads, rosaries, photos and all the other small things I cannot bring myself to surrender. Pandora in reverse, all the evil things are collected here. On the floor, a carpet from Iran, from Beluchestan. I found it in Beirut. Neither the rug from Djemila or the ceramics from Granada made it back. The bowls from Spain were shattered in transit, but there are tea glasses from Aleppo. The glasses are green, blown from the broken remains of old beer bottles. Again with the broken glass. Here are the notes that were torn out of my bag in Paris, the annotations I had made of some now abandoned book. The book was written by Sami Hermez, who uses the phrases “the perpetual coming events” and “the events” to talk about the threat of military violence as a strategy of governance and class dominion in Lebanon. They were scattered around me when the police found me. Now, they sit on the table that is my desk. They are in a frame. They are dotted with blood. The ‘t’s are uncrossed but the eyes are dotted. The war is always about to happen.