let
Sometimes no matter how high you stretch somebody has cut the branches in such a manner that only two cherries can be reached. Always give the first one to your love before tasting the second. Walk through places you do not know in order to better understand the place you think you do. I write to myself here, but if this applies to you, it’s yours.
In the city of Toronto what grows is different, and though I can smell anise hyssop and taste mulberries, neither are the same as what I know in New Orleans.
I saw grape vines stretch across a second floor balcony and knew only the way I once had a ceiling of muscadine vines, the way big black crows talk to each other, the way they let their families know, the way in their eating, what they are really doing is planting seeds.
When the eye comes upon a house where what is growing is not known, there is trouble making sense of what does, of seeing the way things work together, of not questioning the need for a different vision. I consider those who walk into CRISP for the first time. What do they see? Likely a jumble of disorganization. Likely what I might call nature interacting without disturbance from my hand.
In the thought of flying from the love of flesh and bone and back to the love of bird and dirt, I consider how the space around CRISP might invite the eye, for is this not the window to the soul? And once this window opens perhaps there are doors, doors as yet unknown, doors that I can enter along with those that lead to other places.
Like the middle of a park, where your girlfriend learns to throw the frisbee, where her leg pops high in a bend kick that says I did it, where on the bench you feel the reverberation of the pathway pavers, the way the whole ground shakes, the way you know that beneath you a subway races to another stop.
And in this same park there is a man who lives in a tent, who has his own tree, who uses this as what the Canadians call a washroom. I consider how I might be like him. I consider the way he talks to himself as if others are there for his yelling, how he grips a bottle like a weapon. I consider if this were my tent and my tree how I would walk through the park, and on my best days, with just enough wine to be right, I would know that my tree was the best tree because I was the one who peed, that there was something happening between us.
Nasim first lived in the basement of an Italian couple, Ernie and Lena, outside the city with many Koreans. I know kkae nip. I know hangul mal. I know the spot might feel like a dream to Nasim now, the way the world might feel like a dream to Ernie, who only recently had a stroke, who only recently, yesterday, was told by Lena to pull up his pants, who may have forgotten the way life passes through our hands.
Ernie knows not the two cherries we ate yesterday, from a tree not there nine years ago when he did still know.
To create is to glimpse a sense of what life might be like for the God who drops dew before dawn while the children sleep. And to try to explain what I would like to create requires too much space, so I will start with this. With the way a man in a park is the same as a girl in the basement is the same as an ajumma in a singing room is the same as a boy swinging across a rope above a creek in Iowa, is the same as the children who come to my porch and ask, “Mr. Zach, we could go in your yard?”
You never know what you might hold up for somebody to see. You never know how words can offer what you did not even intend to say. I read long ago of an interviewer talking to Hemingway, trying to digest one of his stories, giving his analysis and then asking the old man if he was on track.
Hemingway pointed to his head. “Papa doesn’t write from here.” He put a hand to his heart. “Papa writes from here.”
What if everything really can become something else? What if we are on our way? What if pages of drafts written years before can be dipped in flour and water and draped around a balloon where paint might be applied to make eyes. And what if a child were to look into these eyes and see the god that lives inside. And what if the breeze and rain that comes on this last day in Toronto is a reminder for me to remember this?