Revisited Trees
after Harold Monro

from Trees:
lingering their period of decay
in transitory forms.

I

One summer afternoon, you find
yourself needing respite from
the light and glossy sepia,
from sweat and the rosacea.
You retreat back to your bedroom,
your headset cooler than any
sunlight, and for a moment
you hover in the space between
the Velcro strappings of the screen.
The light emerges, welcome and
heatless, and now you are outside
the within, aiming your sight toward
where the greenlight is thick and lucid.
Your newfound self steps toward a copse,
entranced by the trees’ synchrony,
their breezeless swaying. You make
to touch the bark and forget that
only pixels branch out before you.
You mourn the loss of splinters.
Moments later, the trees begin
to bend to where your hand is,
and your feelings are repurposed.

II

This place was made from the longing
for peace and stillness. You, suddenly
awakened to it, can see it for all its
virtues, looking past the polygons
and rendering limitations at the closest
thing we’ve managed to paradise. You wander
legless to the boundary of the proto-woodland,
but are stopped at the edge of the circle
by a veil of transparent text. You turn
back of your own accord, not wanting
to be a clot in the tranquillity. Somehow
through the padding of your headphones,
you hear a fly encircling you. You’ll think
to swat it later. It was easy to forget here
why things like flies would ever be designed.

III

It is dangerous in this non-space of
diodes and trickery, you hear a leaf
sing, but something about its words
seem hollow. You choose not to trust
its song – it’s probably just another bug,
or some piece of test line they forgot
to edit out. Somewhere in the distance,
the silhouette of an oak model flickers
and transforms into a warning sign. You
have never believed in portents, though
here it is easy to forget yourself. You begin
to feel for the strappings, but your hands
have numbed in this new touchless world.

IV

Outside you miss the sunset. Night
air unrests with the inner sun’s
meridian, which cracks in lower
resolution now you focus on it. In
a few moments, a warning sound
will play and the screen will blacken.
You begin to imagine the trees might
become felled as this world falters,
but you’ve done this many times before.
You remember how the green brands
to the retina after long exposure to
the non-biosphere, how the trees
rebirth themselves as migraines,
how the pixels die in gentle scintillation.

Matthew Thorpe-Coles is a poet and lyric essayist. His writing focuses on queering the landscape, archaeology, and collective memory.